In sleuthing style, Shrier’s astute Toronto PI, Jonah Geller, is more European than American, more a Kurt Wallander than someone along Harry Bosch lines. Geller is expert and dogged in doing the legwork, interviewing the witnesses and linking the clues. When he draws his gun, the violence seems an aberration for a decent guy like Jonah. [...]
Just what the summer ordered: Miss Montreal, a fourth Jonah Geller adventure set in that colourful city, where the word can mean beautiful, dangerous and scandalous … or all three. Just the place for the private investigator, his partner, former hit man Dante Ryan, and a cast of drug and gun runners, distorted politicians and a cultural [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In the push to get homegrown crime novels onto the market, a fair number of mediocre offerings make it into print. Thankfully, local author Howard Shrier’s Jonah Geller books aren’t among them. Miss Montreal, the fourth in this top-notch series featuring Toronto P.I. Jonah Geller, is evidence of that. Geller is back home after a disastrous case [...]
Boston serves as the backdrop for Shrier’s explosive third crime novel featuring Jonah Geller, a Toronto PI with a penchant for cases south of the border. When the Brookline, Mass., police are unable to find David Fine, a “transplant fellow” and devout Jew who’s disappeared from Boston’s Sinai Hospital, Fine’s parents hire Geller to investigate. Aided [...]
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.
