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If there is anyone out there who still imagines Canadians are a repressed and conventional folk, largely distinguished by their peculiar vowel sounds and habit of saying "eh," they should be sat firmly down and required to read the hilarious novels of Calgary native Suzanne North. Her latest in the Phoebe Fairfax series takes place in Drumheller, Alberta, home of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, which houses a world-famous collection of fossils. Phoebe, along with her colleagues, the drop-dead gorgeous Candi and Elly the obsessive, is on assignment to cover the opening of an exhibition of the startling fossil discoveries of Dr Graham Maxwell, who claims to have found the world's earliest hominids, and, moreover, to have determined that they played the flute. To the snickers of the paleoanthropologist community (and one exists), he has dubbed his find homo musicus. Another group is altogether unamused by Maxwell's claims. "Geologists for Jesus" view him as an affront to Biblical truth and will go to any length to disrupt the event. So when Phoebe discovers his corpse, skull fractured by a dinosaur egg and the fossils gone, there are any number of suspects to choose from. Maxwell, it turns out, is a bit of a showman and rather a lot of a lecher and he has a past in Alberta that may have come back to haunt him. Phoebe is a reluctant sleuth at the best of times, but events force her to become involved. Though under considerable stress, she never loses her sense of humour, her soft heart, or her ever-so-slightly jaundiced point of view. North has the unusual ability to mix achingly funny scenes with moments of genuine, unsentimental emotion, and this quality sets her work apart. Highly recommended.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, July 2002
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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