Readers who enjoy hard-boiled detective novels with expert pacing and rich physical details will delight in Miss Montreal, the fourth from Toronto-based novelist Howard Shrier. Those who also hold the city of Montreal dear – potholes and all – will be in heaven. The story begins in late June. Toronto-based private investigator Jonah Geller has been [...]
Take a smart, capable private investigator who’s tough but no superhero, team him with an amusingly bitter, anarchic sidekick with a dark history and a considerable assortment of guns, and you have Jonah Geller and his relatively new buddy Dante Ryan. You also have the fourth in Howard Shrier’s series of crime novels featuring Geller, and [...]
With three cracking good novels already under his belt, Canadian author Howard Shrier has delivered a fourth that will not disappoint his many fans. His debut novel, Buffalo Jump, garnered an Arthur Ellis Award in 2008, and a year later he repeated that achievement with Jump’s sequel, High Chicago. Born and reared in Montreal, Quebec, Shrier began his [...]
Jonah Geller is back in Howard Shrier’s Miss Montreal, the fourth book in his series chronicling the adventures of the determined Toronto private eye. Over four novels, including Buffalo Jump (2008), High Chicago (2009), Boston Cream (2012) and now Miss Montreal (2013), Jonah has gone from working for a security agency as a PI to running his own private investigative business, World Repairs, with partner [...]
It’s a good thing PI Jonah Geller has landed a case in Canada. A slew of recent probes have taken him to the United States, where he’d likely have trouble getting across the border again. This time, the Toronto sleuth is hired by the grandfather of a man recently found beaten to death in Montreal. The [...]
What’s surprising about Howard Shrier’s newest novel featuring his recurring private detective, Jonah Geller, is that it took this long to send his PI to Montreal. The city, after all, has a colourful history of crime, one that hasn’t softened as much from the post-Second World War gangster heyday as one supposes. And Shrier, who previously [...]
Miss Montreal, the latest instalment in Howard Shrier’s Jonah Geller P.I. series, is a great crime romp through our city. Shrier gets Montreal right. The grittiness, the contradictions, the corruption, the politics — even the potholes get a full airing. At the outset, Toronto private investigator Geller reminisces about a childhood friend, Sammy Adler, a boy [...]
Howard Shrier’s acclaimed Jonah Geller series continues with a new case in Montreal. When Jonah Geller last saw Sammy Adler, they were kids at summer camp. Years later, Jonah’s a private detective, and Sammy’s just been found dead in Montreal with a Star of David carved into his chest. With help from his crass sidekick Dante [...]
When Jonah Geller and Sammy Adler were twelve years old, they met at summer camp, where Jonah taught Sammy how to swing a softball bat and tagged him with the semi-ironic nickname that followed him into adulthood - “Slammin’ Sammy.” Now, more than twenty years later, Sammy is dead, his body found in a back alley, [...]
For Howard Shrier, it’s fourth-time lucky with his latest Jonah Geller case, Miss Montreal (Vintage, 288 pages, $20). Not that the Toronto journo hasn’t had his share of good fortune—his scrappy, Jewish, homegrown PI’s 2008 debut, Buffalo Jump, won the Crime Writers of Canada award for best first novel, while the sequel, High Chicago, was named 2009’s best Canadian crime [...]
Howard Shrier is a two-time winner of the Arthur Ellis Award, Canada’s highest prize for crime fiction. The author of the acclaimed Jonah Geller series and other works, he publishes new stories and helps emerging authors finish their books, all on this site.
