Gail Bowen, winner of the 1995 Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel
for her last Joanne Kilbourn mystery, A Colder Kind of Death, is
back - with her most daring mystery to date.
In the horrifying opening paragraph of A Killing Spring, Reed
Gallagher, the head of the School of Journalism at the university where
Joanne Kilbourn teaches, is found dead in a seedy rooming house. He is
dressed in women's lingerie, with an electric cord around his neck.
Suicide, the police say. A clear case of accidental suicide. But for
Joanne, who takes on the thankless task of breaking the news to
Gallagher's wife, this death is just the first in a series of
misfortunes that rock her life, both professional and personal.
A few days after Gallagher's death, the School of Journalism is
vandalized - its offices and computers are trashed, and homophobic
graffiti are sprayed everywhere. Then an unattractive and unpopular
journalism student in Joanne's politics class stops coming to school
after complaining to an unbelieving Joanne that she's being sexually
harassed. Clearly, all is not as well at the university as Joanne had
thought. Nor is all well in her love life after the casual racism of a
stranger drives a wedge between Joanne and her lover, Inspector Alex
Kequahtooway. To make matters worse, Joanne is unceremoniously fired by
her best friend from the weekly political panel on Nationtv, which she's
being doing for years.
Badly shaken by these calamities, Joanne struggles to carry cheerfully
on. Action, she knows, is better for her than moping. She decides to
find out why her student has stopped coming to class, and in doing so,
Joanne steps unknowingly into an on-campus world of fear and deceit and
murder.
