Betsy Struthers

Although the body count gets unrealistically high by the end I still liked this early 90's crime fiction which had a good spooky ambiance especially in the cottage/camp atmosphere in the latter half. The criminals telegraph their suspicious actions to the reader in such a way that the reader feels smarter than the protagonists Rosalie and Will who have yet to figure out what is going on. I always find that to be clever writing which is designed to flatter the reader in an indirect manner.

The show more Rosalie Cairns trilogy was a temporary sideline for poet Betsy Struthers in the early-mid 1990's. It follows the crime solving adventures of a bookstore clerk, student and later academic so it is definitely more in the cozy world than the hard-boiled noir world of crime. I hope to track down the others. show less

found myself irrationally distracted by the cover image on this anthology collection of Betsy Struther's 9 previous poetry collections (with some new poems) which looks like a photograph of an Alberto Giacometti-styled sculpture. The book's credits are frustratingly uninformative about this though, saying only that the cover photo credit is to Marty Gervais (who is also the publisher/owner of Black Moss Press). I kept looking at the cover image every time I picked up the book and was show more constantly mystified as to what was the connection to the book's poems. I guess that is because an out-of-context Giacometti-like sculpture made me think of starvation, anorexia etc. all of which didn't seem like a theme in the poetry.

As mentioned in the book description the poems "cycle through birth, life, and death, families coming together and falling apart." The original sources are itemized at the back of the book, but the poems themselves have been re-arranged by theme rather than chronologically. The "Family Matters" sequence was my favourite. show less