Fit to Die: A Crime and Mystery Collection

Rating:
Summary: Pumped for Murder
Review: Wonder what Canadians do during long, dark winter nights? Plot murders, of course. In yet another entertaining anthology, the Ladies' Killing Circle links rage and revenge with recreation and games. FIT TO DIE features twenty-five selections of fiction spiced with a few tasty poems from a stellar writing stable. Every story engages from paragraph one, Spandexed teens, middle-aged-spread battlers, and galloping grannies at the bridge table, in the exercise room, on the tai chi field or golf course. Try not to read on after these openings: "All the time I was washing pots in the kitchen at Kingston Pen, I was playing golf in my head" or "On our last Tuesday Scrabble night, Mrs. D handed me a sealed lavender envelope and asked me to keep it, 'in case.' Two days later she was dead."
Crime doyenne Mary Jane Maffini weighs in with "Sign of the Times," a gentrification tale which pits neighbour against neighbour, with graffiti artists lurking in the bushes and an ancient dog named Silent Sam. Her consummate talent for the right voice tucks the reader inside the head of a retired art teacher who finds a deadly canvas. Barbara Fradkin, child psychologist, in "Double Trouble" creates a young male persona with aplomb and travels to the hiking hills of Wales, using a darkly-adapted eye reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith's. A coincidence that both leads are named Patrick? H. Mel Malton plants tongue in cheek in a laugh-out-loud romp called "Love Handles." Her likable chubby heroine digs in her heels and her spoon as her obnoxious boyfriend drags her into his fitness craze, choosing "grey hued bean soups and drab green salads like mouldy lace, no dressing" over her "Dijon Chicken with Apricot-Basil Sauce." It's hard not to flag every entry in this collection, but if any story chills to the bone and back, it is R.J. Harlick's "Seigneur Poisson," set in the Quebec wilderness in the middle of a blizzard. Leaving the cozy farmhouse, the "red blur of the barn" behind, stung by driving snow, icy mitts covering his nose, Jacques marches stiffened boots toward a frozen lake in search of his grandfather, ice fishing with the family skeleton, the sinister Hippolyte. The pulse rises with each step as a foregone conclusion bites the heart. The best part of FIT TO DIE is the three other criminous anthologies which precede it.