Howard Shrier follows up last year’s prize-winning Buffalo Jump with a foray into another American city in High Chicago that I thought was, if anything, even better than the first. When Jonah Geller first appeared last year, in Buffalo Jump, he was a rather low-profile employee of Beacon Security, where he spent his time largely doing [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
The latest Jonah Geller novel begins, improbably, at summer camp, where Geller assists a sports-challenged kid in the finals of a softball tournament. It’s a long shot from Geller’s last outing, which found him nearly dead in Boston, and events there mean he’s not returning to the U.S. of A. any time soon. So it’s Toronto [...]
The third Jonah Geller novel by Arthur Ellis-winner Howard Shrier is the best so far. Shrier has a great eye for location and a good ear for dialogue. Add those to solid characters and an intriguing plot and you have a winning combination for any mystery lover. PI Jonah Geller nearly had his brains fried in High [...]
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.
