cover image Blood Wine: A Quin and Morgan Mystery

Blood Wine: A Quin and Morgan Mystery

John Moss. Dundurn (IPS, U.S. dist.; UTP, Canadian dist.), $11.99 mass market (424p) ISBN 978-1-4597-0814-3

Summer 2001: homicide detective Miranda Quin wakes up with a gap in her memory and her lover Philip Carter’s corpse next to her. She’s suspended from the force as a suspect, and it soon becomes clear that the scene was staged and Miranda was herself a victim, sexually assaulted after being drugged by the real killers. It also becomes clear that Quin didn’t really know the late Philip well at all; the man she thought was a lawyer was nothing of the sort. Finding the truth behind his murder will take the investigators into the world of organized crime and a maelstrom of violence where thousands of lives are at stake. The fourth entry in Quin and Morgan series, the work feels oddly dated, as though it was a very belated attempt to engage with or at least exploit the passions that followed the 9/11 attacks. The slowly expanding scale of the stakes is interestingly handled, but the plot as a whole fails to convince, with each new revelation underscoring the fact that this is an artifact of fiction in which every twist occurs according to the will of the author. (June)