I have a couple of criteria that I regularly apply to books. One is whether I’ve had to hold myself back from racing through it. The other is whether I continue to think about it after I’ve put it down.
I received my review copy of Deryn Collier’s Confined Space late on a Saturday morning. I sat down and read a hundred pages, then put it down to do some other things. Later in the afternoon I had to force myself to stop reading at page 200. After another hundred pages in bed, I could hardly wait for morning to come. I finished it in bed with my coffee.
On that beautiful Sunday, I decided to tackle some yardwork, starting with mowing and dethatching my lawn. I ran the mower over it once, then flipped the machine on its side to change from a cutting blade to dethatching blade. First, though, I reached over to pull the spark plug wire from the plug. Hmmm, I thought, that isn’t something I normally do. Safety isn’t my strong suit, as witnessed by a missing digit and severe scarring on the hand I once put through my table saw. I might not have learned from the accident, but I did from Confined Space.
Collier’s first novel, written in Creston and started an hour after she put in her final shift at Columbia Brewery, is a fine-tuned, edge-of-one’s-seat thriller that combines interesting, true-to-life characters with a suspense-filled plot. After reading only a few pages, I had forgotten the author is a friend and became completely immersed in the story itself.
Confined Space is destined to become the first in a series of novels featuring coroner Bern Fortin, a complex and sympathetic character who has escaped to small-town British Columbia in an attempt to put distance between himself and the horrors he faced in his military career. Fortin finds himself entwined with the life of brewery safety officer Evie Chapelle when he begins to investigate the death of a worker who is found floating in a bottle-washing tank.
It’s something of a surprise that a first-time crime fiction novelist is being published by a major house like Simon & Schuster Canada. It won’t be a surprise if Collier goes on to a successful career in her chosen genre. Readers of Confined Space are left wanting more from this promising new writer.
