A private eye, a podcast, a rock band and revenge take the lead in four new crime novels

Dundurn Press, 304 pages, $24.99

The debut novel from Toronto author Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson is a stylish throwback to hard-boiled crime thrillers of the classic era, with an engaging and entertaining protagonist at its heart. Set largely in Toronto’s Parkdale neighbourhood over two days in July 1965, the novel introduces us to Patrick Bird, a failed police academy student turned private eye whose specialty is tracking down wayward spouses in divorce cases. When his no-nonsense boss throws him on the trail of a missing daughter from a well-to-do family, he finds himself immersed in family secrets; a strange, cultlike evangelical group running out of a local church; and a cold-case bank robbery from more than a decade earlier.

Stefanovich-Thomson has studded his narrative with references to Toronto landmarks from the ’60s — the Riverboat café, the Bohemian Embassy, the Boulevard Club, the Edgewater Hotel — and his period dialogue positively crackles. But the real attraction here is Bird, a neophyte P.I. whose surface confidence masks conflicted ideas about how to proceed as he learns more about the teenager he is charged with finding. The compressed time frame adds a propulsive element to the narrative and the author is adept at deploying plot turns at appropriate and surprising intervals, lending the story a vibrancy that keeps the reader plowing forward relentlessly.

Only One Survives

Hannah Mary McKinnon

Mira, 400 pages, $23.99

On the way to a publicity event in the Catskills, an all-girl band’s van goes off-road during a snowstorm; one member of the Bittersweet is killed and another badly injured. The four survivors, along with a tagalong documentarian, take refuge in a nearby abandoned cabin, where things get progressively more dire as they struggle to live through the night.

This setup is only one strain in Hannah Mary McKinnon’s mousetrap-like novel, which spends its first half flashing back and forth between the fallout from the accident and the narrative past, in which we meet Vienna and Madison, the Bittersweet’s two founding members, and learn how their high school friendship led to early success as a duo and then a full-fledged pop-rock quintet. The other band members provide colour, but the real focus is on the two vocalists and songwriters — their difficult family histories, their close bond over shared musical tastes (’80s staples like the Go-Go’s, the Bangles, and Blondie proliferate), and their increasing rivalry for the spotlight.

But it’s the second half of the novel that shatters expectations, calling into question everything the reader has previously thought about the characters and their motivations. Not all of this works — it demands a suspension of disbelief that occasionally tugs too hard — but McKinnon is adept at keeping the pages turning, allowing for a wickedly entertaining ride, provided one doesn’t think about it too much.

Broiler

Eli Cranor

Soho Press, 336 pages, $36.95

Arkansas writer Eli Cranor, who won the Edgar Award for his first novel, “Don’t Know Tough,” returns with a third book, this one about Gabby and Edwin, a pair of undocumented Mexicans who work punishing ten-hour shifts in a chicken processing factory under inhuman conditions (Gabby wears a diaper on the line because she is not allowed bathroom breaks). When Edwin is fired for being two minutes late, he decides to seek revenge on his uncaring boss (who is up for a promotion and only knew of Edwin’s tardiness because he was similarly late) in a particularly unwise, not to say criminal, fashion.

Cranor writes in the mode of Ozark noir, his narrative split between the Mexican have-nots and the privileged white haves represented by Luke Jackson, the plant manager, and his wife, who is part of a support group for new mothers. For all its genre trappings, “Broiler” is a character-driven novel whose central quartet serves as piquant emblems of a capitalist system that is ruthlessly structured to keep the classes (and, not incidentally, the races) separate and unequal. There is no didactic preaching here: Cranor sets up his scenario and lets it play out without any overt moralizing, allowing his message about a stacked system to bleed through the increasingly desperate scenario.

Known to the Victim

K.L. Armstrong

Doubleday Canada, 334 pp., $25

The same cannot be said of the latest novel from K.L. Armstrong, the author of three previous psychological thrillers. Armstrong’s book reads more like an ethics textbook than a thriller.

“Known to the Victim” takes as its focus the trendy subject of true-crime podcasts. Amy Gibson is the voice behind the eponymous series, dedicated to investigations of intimate partner violence. Amy knows whereof she speaks: eight years ago, her mother was murdered by a boyfriend. When her half-brother, who has been her rock and support in her ongoing grief, is accused of abusing his partner, Amy struggles with her allegiances.

Armstrong, who writes young adult and supernatural thrillers as Kelley Armstrong, studs her novel with the language of therapy — double trauma, gaslighting, triggering — and constantly cues the reader on how to respond to any given situation. Worse, for a PhD student and supposedly savvy podcaster, Amy proves spectacularly dense as she tries to figure out what is going on, something a reader should be able to do long before she does.