Writers Read: Eva Gates

Thursday, June 8, 2023

Eva Gates

Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than

forty-five books: clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy. She is currently writing four cozy mystery series: the Catskill Summer Resort mysteries for Penguin Random House, the Tea by the Sea mysteries for Kensington, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series for Crooked Lane Books, and the Lighthouse Library series (as Eva Gates) for Crooked Lane.

Delany is a past president of the Crime Writers of Canada and co-founder and organizer of the Women Killing It Crime Writing Festival. Her work has been nominated for the Derringer, the Bony Blithe, the Ontario Library Association Golden Oak, and the Arthur Ellis Awards. Delany is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

The latest Eva Gates's Lighthouse Library mystery is Death Knells and Wedding Bells.

Recently I asked Delany about what she was reading. Her reply:

I rarely have two books on the go at one time. I’m more of a straight-forward, linear reader. One book, beginning to end, and then pick up the next.

But right now I am reading two. One of my daughters invited me to her book club recently when I was visiting. The book the club was reading is When Women Ruled the World by Kara Cooney. I hadn’t read the book but I enjoyed the discussion and found the topic interesting enough to want to find out more. It’s an account of six queens of ancient Egypt, who ruled their countries and empires and with full power, despite living in an otherwise patriarchal society. In my opinion, the book should be more accurately titled When A Woman Ruled the World, as these women might have had absolute power but those rights and powers did not extend to other women. The societies remained as patriarchal as ever. I’m not far into the book, but I am hoping to find out a lot more about the queens themselves and the society they lived in. The book can be hard to plow through in some places. The names for one thing are hard to get your head around and keep straight!

In a break from non-fiction tomes dealing with gender politics I’m reading Never Coming Home by Hannah Mary McKinnon and enjoying it enormously. This is not a whodunit. We know from the get-go, who did what, why, and how. The story is told completely from the POV of the villain, and I normally wouldn’t care for that, but McKinnon handles her protagonist with sensitivity that never veers on us wanting to be on his side. He has enough humanity that we can, for a brief moment, feel sorry for him. But ultimately he’s a baddy and we know it. The tension lies in watching his clever plan come apart and waiting for him to get his comeuppance, which I certainly hope is what all this is leading to. Great book with marvellous plotting.

I’m a gigantic fan of Kate Morton, and have been since her first book, The House at Riverton. One of my favourite books of the last several years is her The Secret Keeper. Her new book is Homecoming. This book is set in Australia rather than her usual England. It’s not the best, by far, of her books, but still a good book that alternates between a mass murder of almost an entire family in Australia in 1959 and the present day of one of the descendants of a survivor. The plot stumbles at times and the big reveal is way too easy to spot from a long way away but the writing is truly beautiful. Worth a visit to Australia.