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 the best and liveliest so far.
Shrier, a Montreal native and former journalist there, who now lives in Toronto, brings both cities and his old profession into Miss Montreal, along with an array of current tensions and nearly-up-to-the-minute concerns.
Happily back in Canada after a brutal U.S. case, Geller is summoned to the Toronto bedside of a wealthy, dying old man who wants him to look into the beating death of his grandson in Montreal. The body of Sammy Adler, a very popular newspaper columnist and feature writer, was found in a part of town largely populated by Muslims, with a star of David carved into his chest. The assumptions of a hate crime are obvious, the tensions volatile.
The awkward kid Sammy turned into a popular columnist writing serious satire, as well as doing investigative features and profiles of Montreal’s famous and, occasionally, infamous. And now he’s a victim of murder.
When they get into his work files, Jonah and Dante find he’s been building material on a couple of stories, including a look at a father-daughter team of politicians working hard to build support for their Quebec-first, anti-immigrant movement.
He has also been interviewing a Muslim family, intending to write a piece demonstrating that the case of a father who burned a building with his daughters inside, in a so-called “honour” killing, was an aberration and affront to people living with real honor in their faith.
Yet another file, labelled “Miss Montreal”, is empty, and the men can find no hints to its meaning.
Howard Shrier does it right — and thoughtfully.
As they trace Sammy’s professional and personal lives, they obviously have to check out the area where his body was found. In the course of their explorings, they encounter not only the shopkeeper brother and sister of the Muslim family Adler was to profile, but fellows with, apparently, more sinister interests.
As a Jew, Jonah Geller may be viewed in those neighborhoods with some wariness, but he’s also keenly alert to the hatred and discrimination against previous generations of immigrants to Quebec, most notably Jews. It’s a context that leans him much closer to the dilemmas of Muslims, and much farther from the Quebec-first party and its father-daughter leaders stirring up opposition to anyone not deemed pure laine.
Crime novels featuring able, sympathetic investigator bonded with rough-and-tumble, harder-edged buddy constitute a familiar formula, but it’s a formula that, done right, can be winningly fun to read. In Miss Montreal, Howard Shrier does it right — and does so thoughtfully, in the context of some important, current issues while he’s about it. — Joan Barfoot, London Free Press
