ORANGES AND LEMONS by Liz Bugg (Insomniac), 308 pages. $19.95 paper. Rating: NN
As desperately as I wanted to love Liz Bugg’s new mystery – is there anything more delicious than a dyke detective working out of Kensington Market? – Oranges And Lemons is too messy to embrace.
The engaging jeans-and-T-shirt-styled Calli Barnow is compelled to tart herself up to go undercover at an ad agency to investigate financial irregularities. Soon there are three dead bodies, and what looked like a white-collar crime case has escalated considerably.
Calli’s friend and collaborator Dewey, the drag performer, is big fun, and her main client, the sexually charged Barbara Reynolds, is pretty compelling, too.
But Bugg is narratively challenged. Why does Barlow agree to a midnight meeting with someone she’s suspected since the beginning of the case? An editor should have insisted on a follow-up sequence to the big showdown with the bad guy, because it raises major questions. And by the time of the big reveal, you’re wondering why Barlow was hired in the first place.
The writing is also pedestrian. How does someone “cross mental fingers?” for example. And, though it’s always fun to read a mystery set in Toronto, it’s annoying that Bugg keeps making geographical errors. In the first in this series, she placed the Market’s vintage stores on Augusta instead of Kensington. Here, Calli makes a right turn onto Queen off Yonge – strictly illegal.
This is fiction, I know, but one reason to read a story set in your own city is the pleasure of recognizing locations. Get it right, please.
Bugg reads as part of the Fiction With Friction series at Glad Day, Saturday (June 30). See listing.
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