Writers Read: Vicki Delany

Wednesday, July 23, 2025

Vicki Delany

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 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 Tea by the Sea mysteries for Kensington, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series for Crooked Lane Books, the Catskill Resort mysteries for Penguin Random House, 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. She is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. Delany lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.

Tea with Jam & Dread is her newest Tea by the Sea mystery.

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

I’m a summertime reader. I get far more reading done in the summer than any other time of year, except when I’m on vacation. I love nothing more than sitting in the sun by the pool, reading reading reading. And my house looks it, but I can tidy it in September.

What have I been enjoying this summer?

Shipwrecked Souls by Barbara Fradkin. Full disclaimer here, Barbara is a very close friend of mine. But that shouldn’t prevent me from enjoying her books and I do. This is the 12th of her popular Inspector Green series, set in Canada’s capital city of Ottawa. The books are gritty and tough, with difficult themes handled sensitively and well. In Shipwrecked Souls, the death of a woman recently arrived from Ukraine unravels secrets stretching back to the Holocaust.

A completely different read is In Winter I get up at Night by Jane Urquhart. Not a mystery or crime novel, but the memoires of a Saskatchewan woman stretching from her family’s arrival in the 20s as settlers on the northern Great Plains, the one-room schoolhouse she was educated in, the entire year of her girlhood she spent in hospital, her teaching career, and the long, long secret affair she had with a famous man in the 1950s and 60s. Throw in some Dukaboors, Jewish radical socialists, medical procedures, rabid racists when the object of racism was people from Eastern Europe, and wonderful evocative descriptions of Saskatchewan. The book is a novel, but a beautiful rendition of one woman’s life in times not so far from our own.

For sheer fun, nothing beats the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books by Laurie R. King. I’ve been reading this series since the first book, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice came out thirty years ago, and still love them. As I reader I wasn’t entirely happy when Sherlock Holmes married a woman something like 40 years younger than him, but I’m coming around to enjoying their relationship. Particularly, as Russell (as he calls her) is Holmes (as she calls him) equal (or better?) in every way. The most recent book is Knave of Diamonds. Russell’s long lost uncle appears, and he might have something to do with the disappearance of some famous jewels many years ago.