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Fiction. Mystery. HTML:Gail Bowen, winner of the 1995 Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel for her last Joanne Kilbourn mystery, A Colder Kind of Death, is back – with her most daring mystery to date.In the horrifying opening paragraph of A Killing Spring, Reed Gallagher, the head of the School of Journalism at the university where Joanne Kilbourn teaches, is found dead in a seedy rooming house. He is dressed in women’s lingerie, with an electric cord around his neck. Suicide, the show more police say. A clear case of accidental suicide. But for Joanne, who takes on the thankless task of breaking the news to Gallagher’s wife, this death is just the first in a series of misfortunes that rock her life, both professional and personal.
A few days after Gallagher’s death, the School of Journalism is vandalized – its offices and computers are trashed, and homophobic graffiti are sprayed everywhere. Then an unattractive and unpopular journalism student in Joanne’s politics class stops coming to school after complaining to an unbelieving Joanne that she’s being sexually harassed. Clearly, all is not as well at the university as Joanne had thought. Nor is all well in her love life after the casual racism of a stranger drives a wedge between Joanne and her lover, Inspector Alex Kequahtooway. To make matters worse, Joanne is unceremoniously fired by her best friend from the weekly political panel on Nationtv, which she’s being doing for years.
Badly shaken by these calamities, Joanne struggles to carry cheerfully on. Action, she knows, is better for her than moping. She decides to find out why her student has stopped coming to class, and in doing so, Joanne steps unknowingly into an on-campus world of fear and deceit and murder. show less
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Member Reviews
I just reread this book after many years. Liked it for all the same reasons as last time: a crime or mystery novel, set in Canada, and protagonist Joanne Kilbourn is an ordinary woman who has to feed her family and go to work. She's involved in politics and has a believable set of friends---I like the series' Canadianess, and how real the people seem. I look forward to rereading the other Joanne Kilbourn books.
The mystery was good, the non-recurring characters were interesting, and the writing was down-to-earth. Many things happened in Joanne's personal life too, of course. Some of which made me sad. Full review: http://www.canadianauthors.net/b/bowen_gail/killing_spring_a.php
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40+ Works 2,018 Members
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- A killing spring
- Original publication date
- 1996
- People/Characters
- Joanne Kilbourn
- Important places
- Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 115
- Popularity
- 281,701
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.40)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
- ASINs
- 2
