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	Reading and writing have been a passion for Laurie Wood since winning city-wide writing contests in Grade Five and Eight. Her favourite genres are romantic suspense, mysteries, and a good spine-tingling thriller. She loves to judge contests as well as enter them, and is active in several RWA Chapters. Although published in non-fiction articles, she's yet to grab the golden ring of being published in novel-length fiction. Until then, she writes at home and takes care of her two special needs children, an alpha male husband who inspires her heroes, and a golden retriever who thinks she's just a kid in fur.

DIRTY SWEET
John McFetridge
ECW Press, May 2006, 336 Pgs.
$24.95 US/$28.95 Cdn
ISBN 1-55022-717-3

DIRTY SWEET is a complex, gritty, smorgasbord of goodies for lovers of the contemporary crime noir genre. While the story is told at a dizzying pace, McFetridge manages to imbue all his anti-heroes and his one femme fatale with three dimensional grace, courage, and tragic irony.

Roxanne Keyes, a condo real estate agent witnesses a man being shot in the head behind the wheel of his SUV on Toronto's downtown King Street. She recognizes the man with the killer - Russian gangster Boris Suleimanov and strip club owner - and being a femme fatale, she sees the possibilities open to her by lying to the police. She has a difficult past and problems of her own so buttering up porn king, Vince Fournier who rents office space from her seems like a good idea too. Which guy is going to bring her more money?

And let's not forget Toronto's seedy, underworld bikers who're out to control the drug trade. They don't like Russian gangsters muscling into their turf. Even with the bikers, the author manages to make them human, not stereotypes, by having one of them wonder when he'd last seen a woman without tattoos or piercings, as he looks longingly at a woman with a perfect tan.

McFetridge taps into every area of Toronto to bring out the city as a first class international setting. This novel elevates the Canadian crime novel to new heights and is a "must read" for those of you who enjoy reading novels set in Canada.

John McFetridge studied at Concordia University and the Canadian Film Centre. He worked on film sets before writing screen plays and co-writing the novel Below the Line.

Laurie J. Wood

WILD THING - An Eddie Dancer Mystery
Mike Harrison
ECW Press, May 2006, 287 Pgs.
$24.95 US/$28.95 Cdn
ISBN 1-55022-719-X

For those of you who missed the first Eddie Dancer book, All Shook Up, don't make the same mistake with this second book by Mike Harrison. Eddie Dancer is a private investigator out of Calgary who does things in his own way, and is more intelligent than most protagonists who hide bottles of scotch in their desks

When his good friend, Dr Peter Maurice, a renowned psychologist on a book tour of Great Britain, calls him for help, Eddie takes the first plane over. Dr. Maurice has been arrested for a series of horrible murders and needs Eddie's investigative powers to prove the British police wrong.

Dr Maurice has purchased a two hundred year old manuscript from the great-great-granddaughter of Dr. Franz-Anton Mesmer, the father of hypnotism. The granddaughter is suddenly the first woman to die a horrible death at the hands of a serial killer whose methods are so torturous that even jaded police detectives are shocked. They call him "The Crusher". And the killings don't stop once Dr. Maurice is locked up.

Eddie unearths some horrifying information about Britain's Newgate Prison, frequented by Mesmer but long ago burnt to the ground. Unlike some working the case, Eddie doesn't believe this killer is a reincarnation of one of Mesmer's patients. The combination of the paranormal, the British setting, the historical facts, and Eddie's tactics, make for a richly textured story.

Eddie pursues the murderer with relentless passion and the ending is shocking. WILD THING is a hard-boiled private eye novel that will satisfy the most critical fans of the genre.

MIKE HARRISON'S first Eddie Dancer novel All Shook Up, was praised by Kirkus Reviews ("A hard-boiled shamus...a lively first read") and Library Journal ("Dancer is tough and gutsy...essential reading") He lives in Okotoks, Alberta.

Laurie J. Wood

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