Cut to the Bone
A Hollis Grant Mystery
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Murders and disappearances in one building … but are they connected?
Hollis Grant has fashioned a new life for herself with a foster child and a job as resident super of an eight-storey apartment building with a split personality. Hollis finds herself in the middle of a murder investigation when a tenant, a woman working for an escort agency, is murdered. The detective in charge is Rhona Simpson, with whom Hollis has crossed swords in the past. Rhona, deeply shaken by a report on racial and sexual violence against Native girls and women, is wrestling with an identity crisis as she comes to terms with her own Native heritage.
Hollis’s life is further complicated by the disappearance of Mary, a First Nations tenant who leaves a niece behind and a message asking Hollis to care for her. Hollis gives herself 24 hours to locate Mary, but her search for the woman places her in grave danger. Will Hollis end up as yet another victim?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Boswell's fourth Hollis Grant mystery (after 2009's Cut to the Chase) finds the crime-solving painter having changed her life to become the superintendent of an innocuous Toronto apartment building, living there with her newly adopted foster daughter, 11-year-old Jay Brownelly. Also in the building is a discreet coterie of prostitutes, whose common determination to avoid violent predators doesn't prevent one of them, Sabrina Trepanier, from being brutally murdered. Det. Rhona Simpson, with whom Hollis has previously clashed, arrives to investigate, but finds herself struggling with the Native American, or in Canadian parlance "First Nation," heritage she shares with many of the sex workers at risk. Hollis discovers in the course of the case, meanwhile, that the police often place crimes involving minorities on the back burner. While the plotting rarely surprises, and Hollis's tone sometimes becomes patronizing toward the story's victims of injustice, the book stands out in its genre for tackling the unfamiliar subject of Canadian racial attitudes.
