cover image Indiana Pulcinella

Indiana Pulcinella

Garry Ryan. NeWest (LitDistCo, dist.), $18.95 trade paper (221p) ISBN 978-1-926455-57-0

Ryan’s gritty eighth Detective Lane police procedural mystery, set in Calgary, tells two stories. One is the hunt for killers who have murdered a prominent couple and bizarrely arranged their bodies in a similar fashion to that of three previous murders, for which a homeless schizophrenic man was convicted and imprisoned several years before. The second is much closer to home for Lane. It begins with the birth of his niece Christine’s son, Indiana, and follows the struggle to keep the baby away from Christine’s mother, who wants to take the baby away from her daughter and have him live with her in Paradise, a polygamist commune with a cultish hold on its members, from which Christine fled years before. Although that plot line is a complex one, the dual focus between Lane’s police work and personal life is a strength throughout the series. Readers know Lane as a detective but also through his relationships with his romantic partner, Arthur (The Lucky Elephant Restaurant won a Lambda Literary Award in 2007), and other characters such as his police partner, Detective Nigel Li. This book delivers a tense crime story wrapped in a realistic view of the tough police work required to solve it. (May)