[REVIEW] Gail Bowen's The Last Good Day
Aug. 6th, 2005 11:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldI've been a fan of Saskatchewan-based mystery writer Gail Bowen ever since I heard her third novel, 1992's The Wandering Soul Murders, serialized on CBC Radio. Bowen's protagonist, university teacher, mother, and political widow Joanne Kilbourne, is an appealing figure, investigating the mysterious and deadly events that surround her in Saskatchewan. Kilbourne's plausibility, like that of other long-running mysterty protagonists, is somewhat undermined by the sheer number of murderous conspiracies that she stumbles across (nine to date), but Kilbourne remains a realistic character embedded in a recognizable and realistic environment and a pleasure to read.
I was sorry to finish her most recent novel, The Last Good Day, today. Bowen consistently improves as a writer with each novel. I was so caught up by 2002's The Glass Coffin when I first read it, for instance, that not only did I abandon my workout but I got to my then-job late. The theme of responsibility is something that has always been prominent in the Joanne Kilbourne novels, but the most recent titles do a superlative job of exploring what happens when people fail to live up to their responsibilities. The Glass Coffin dealt with the failures of the artist excessively devoted to his craft. The Last Good Day is concerned with the responsibility to care as seen through the discipline of the law, perhaps the single professional discipline most concerned with ethics. I enjoyed following Kilbourne's discovery of these hidden failures found in the most unexpected places, starting with Chapter 1.
Bowen, like the best mystery writers everywhere, is a writer who wonderfully portrays how decisions made in haste or with good intentions matter, how unspoken hurts and public crimes condition people to react in certain ways, how the little things of everyday life can lead to great crimes with only a few missteps. The Last Good Day is her best so far. What obligations do we have to those we protect? Kilbourne's unwitting explorations on the shores of Lawyers' Bay make up one wonderfully readable answer to that question.
I was sorry to finish her most recent novel, The Last Good Day, today. Bowen consistently improves as a writer with each novel. I was so caught up by 2002's The Glass Coffin when I first read it, for instance, that not only did I abandon my workout but I got to my then-job late. The theme of responsibility is something that has always been prominent in the Joanne Kilbourne novels, but the most recent titles do a superlative job of exploring what happens when people fail to live up to their responsibilities. The Glass Coffin dealt with the failures of the artist excessively devoted to his craft. The Last Good Day is concerned with the responsibility to care as seen through the discipline of the law, perhaps the single professional discipline most concerned with ethics. I enjoyed following Kilbourne's discovery of these hidden failures found in the most unexpected places, starting with Chapter 1.
The cosmos should send forth a sign when a good man approaches death, but the night Chris Altieri joined me in the gazebo to watch the sun set on Lawyers’ Bay, there was nothing. No fiery letters flaming across the wide prairie sky; no angels with bright hair beckoning from the clouds. The evening was innocent, sweet with summer dreams and the promise of life at a cottage in a season just begun. It was July 1, Canada Day. The lake was full of fish. The paint on the Muskoka chairs was crayon bright; the paddles, sticky with fresh varnish, were on their hooks in the boathouse; and the board games and croquet sets still had all their pieces. September with its tether of routine and responsibility was a thousand years away. Anything was possible, and the gentle-voiced man who dropped into the chair next to mine seemed favoured by fortune to seize the best that summer had to offer.
Bright, successful, and charming, Chris Altieri was, in E.A. Robinson’s poignant phrase, everything to make us wish that we were in his place. Yet this graceful man wouldn’t live to see the rising of the orange sun that was now plunging towards the horizon, and when I learned that he was dead, I wasn’t surprised.
Bowen, like the best mystery writers everywhere, is a writer who wonderfully portrays how decisions made in haste or with good intentions matter, how unspoken hurts and public crimes condition people to react in certain ways, how the little things of everyday life can lead to great crimes with only a few missteps. The Last Good Day is her best so far. What obligations do we have to those we protect? Kilbourne's unwitting explorations on the shores of Lawyers' Bay make up one wonderfully readable answer to that question.
