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DY=\/AV/=) Sapte] ma=) Oakville Beaver | Thursday, November 3, 2022 | 40 Join some of Canada’s largest companies who rely on us for their ecommerce delivery. And now, Metroland Parcel Services makes it easier and faster to onboard for ShipStation clients. Contact us today for your user name and password and start shipping* with MPS tomorrow. SCAN FOR M PARCEL SERVICES ESRMATOn insidehalton.com BOOKS 4 CRIME FICTION BOOKS T0 KEEP YOU ENTERTAINED ON LONG WINTER NIGHTS JACK BATTEN LONG SHADOWS By David Baldacci Grand Central, 432 pag- es, $37 This is David Baldacci's Decker, the FBI agent with the spookily phenomenal memory. Events find Deck- er in the bureau's very bad books. He dresses too casu- ally for his spic-and-span bosses, doesn't mask his contempt for their by-the- book methods, is annoying- y successful for a guy who orks investigative unor- thodoxy for all its worth. In the new book, Decker is as- signed to the murder of a Naples, Florida, judge (fe- male) and her bodyguard (male). It's a case Decker de- scribes as dwelling “in al- most total darkness with a few feeble points of light." Since Baldacci is the abso- lute master of provocative mini-twists in his plots, the narrative slides through a maze of zigs and zags, a list that includes puzzling mat- ters of sex, big business and politics. IN THE SPIRIT OF 13 By the Mesdames of Mayhem Carrick, 408 $19.99 Whimsy can be difficult to get right. That doesn't stop some of the free-spirit- ed Mesdames of Mayhem, a group of Canadian women crime fiction writers, from inserting a share of it into the fifth anthology of sto- ries, 22 of them. The point is that, rather than stick to conventional crime stories, pages, it is that we get stories fea- turing a fake psychic, a dyb- Grand Central photo BEFORE THERE WERE SKELETONS Superior Shores Press photo From left: Long Shadows, by David Baldacci, Grand Central, 432 pages, $37; Before There Were Skeletons by Judy Penz Sheluk. buk and a Korean ghost. More space goes to entities that are merely ancient — featuring a Hollywood back lot, Charles Lindbergh and characters from the speak- easy era. Not all of it works, but ere's more than enough to 0 light up and sur- for hights of; esau, some of it in easygoing wl SINISTER GRAVES Bl Marcie R. Rendon 10, 240 pages, $36.95. tet the 1970s, rural Min- nesota, and the question is not so much whether a 19- year-old Ojibwe woman named Cash Blackbear will solve the murder; it's wheth- er shell survive her own drinking _ lifestyle. Cash, on balance an aito- gether eng also a prize student ate the local college and mixes her superior intelligence with an otherworldly ability to interpret strangers’ thoughts. Cash has a part- time job as an assistant toa nearby town's sheriff and when floodwaters to sight the body: ofa wo! ‘a woman who is clearly a murder vic- tim, the sheriffassigns Cash to the case. As a sleuth, she hasa surprisingly tradition- al gumshoe approach, but she also draws on a little of her mind-reading specialty and examples of Aboriginal spirituality. BEFORE THERE WERE SKELETONS By Judy Penz Sheluk Superior Shores Press, 261 pages, $19.99 Calamity Barnstable, the Ontario private eye spe- cializing in missing per- sons, got her ame from the Wild West figure, the version played in the Doris Day movies: a little smart alecky, but reasoned and charming. She oper- ates out of Marketville, a town an hour north of To- ronto. In this book, the ie has women on her hands, slim and between the ages of 18 and 20 when they van- ished in the winter of 1995, one of them a member of family. Are ay “eidnapping victims? the crimes connected? clever, determined and the stuff of solid noir.