The death of a son or daughter is capable of producing emotional devastation from which it is nearly impossible to recover. For Thaddeus Lewis, a preacher who travels throughout Upper Canada in the late 1830s, the loss of his daughter Sarah, “a sweet seventeen year old, with a laughing, teasing manner that made the most somber of people brighten,” is a staggering blow.

The “strange marks on her neck” are a clear sign of strangulation, but a coroner’s inquest blithely declares that Sarah died of natural causes. As Lewis discovers during his travels, spreading his brand of Christian charity to fledgling communities struggling in the wake of the 1837 Upper Canada Rebellion, Sarah is only the first of several girls to be murdered, and the task of catching the killer falls to him. It is a job that tests his faith, forces him to admit serious misjudgment of character, and compels him to come to terms with “the badness [that] is always there, in everybody.”

Kellough’s book works on multiple levels; the murder mystery is woven into the larger story of Canada’s wild, pre-Confederation era. The identity of the murderer is apparent early on, but Lewis can’t see it because he is unwilling to believe that a person can be inherently evil. Scenes of Lewis acting out his religious beliefs invite emotional connection, and the novel’s final chapters successfully mirror the arc of a Greek tragedy. However, On the Head of a Pin relies too heavily on its source material (a privately published account of the Rebellion) to fully exploit the power of its fictional narrative. Kellough’s tentativeness in letting her imagination loose holds back the book. 

Somewhere deep inside, there is a good book housed between the pages of Jill Edmondson’s debut novel. Blood and Groom’s main character, newly licensed downtown Toronto P.I. (and former rock singer) Sasha Jackson, has enough sass and quirk to hold a reader’s interest (particularly entertaining is Sasha’s occasional moonlighting as a phone sex operator to stave off mounting credit card bills).

The overarching mystery – who is killing off prospective bridegrooms, and why? – has the narrative torque for a surprise or two, even if the identity of the culprit is telegraphed halfway through the book. And a subplot involving a nerdy gadget-freak with a puppy-dog fixation on Sasha produces zingers like, “I noticed his scent, a mixture of Old Spice and sulphur,” but spins out predictably, particularly when Sasha’s nebbish pseudo-stalker turns out to have a little bit of superman inside him.

To get to some decent entertainment, however, the reader must suffer through faulty pacing and some awkward prose. The opening chapter – which follows the time-worn “client walks into the office” template – plays almost too quickly, and later, at a critical juncture, Sasha declares, “I knew I’d be dead before I knew it.” She has a tendency to describe in great detail what she eats, and at one point alerts the reader she is “[f]ortified after a yummy lunch.” The book relies on too much exposition, and does not allow the reader to come to her own conclusions about the characters.