Howard Engel (1931–2019)

I know very little about St Catharines/Grantham, but I've lived five miles down the road from a Canadian toxic waste disposal firm since 1990 (when this book was published). I got no sense of familiarity. The reality is both more audacious than the fiction, and less -- in the 90s I heard persistent rumours about the worst case scenario for the most toxic of wastes, dig a big hole, roll in the tanker trailer (probably leaking already, at the end of its useful life) and bury it whole. Come to find out the stories are true and that was at one time standard operating procedure. These guys in Grantham were wimpy, burying stuff a few barrels at a time under the foundations of a historic fort, and under the floral clocks in Niagara Falls as well. Penny ante stuff. On the other hand, putting a corpse in with the barrels is a bit over the top even for the most criminal of toxic waste companies, at least in Canada. The situation in this book is not the same kind of struggle that permeated the 1990s here in the shadow of TriCil, Laidlaw, SafetyKleen, Clean Harbors (they keep selling the company, probably for nefarious reasons). It's an interesting story and Engel has the environmental message correct, but it's like a different world.… (more)

I love this mystery series: It's set in "Grantham", a thinly veiled St. Catharines Ontario, my husband's hometown and where I worked for 20 years, lived for nearly a decade and made many life-defining decisions. St. Catharines is the closest I have to a hometown of my own. So I love the setting of the city and other areas in the Niagara region where it is located, and I love Benny Cooperman, the hapless P.I. who bumbles through it.

The mysteries themselves are uneven: some are wonderful, others so-so. A victim Must Be Found is one of the "mehs". I doubt it's worth reading for anyone who doesn't care about Benny or Grantham.… (more)