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“Anne Emery has given readers so much to feast upon in her latest novel Barrington Street Blues...She dares to challenge those readers who are so fond of anticipating the outcome of the plot...Barrington Street Blues should earn Anne Emery the right to fly first class from this point on.”
Anne Emery has given readers so much to feast upon in her latest novel Barrington Street Blues. The core of characters, common to all three of her novels, has become almost as important to the reader as the plots. She is becoming known for her complexity and subtlety in her story construction.
She dares to challenge those readers who are so fond of anticipating the outcome of the plot.
Emery also places her characters in situations where life-changing decisions must be made and somehow she is able to edge the thoughtful reader into speculating how they would handle such a situation.
Most of the novel is set in Halifax in the early 1990s. Two men are found dead outside a south-end pub. The police determine homicide and suicide but Monte Collins, 44, the central character and the narrator in all three novels, is not so sure.
Collins, his firm’s only criminal defence lawyer, has to poke into the unseemly side of existence in Halifax before he begins to see vague connections between a string of clues. In addition Collins must also seek ways to heal the breach between himself and his wife Maura.
Barrington Street Blues should earn Anne Emery the right to fly first class from this point on.
She won the Arthur Ellis Award for best first novel for Sign of the Cross and she followed strongly the next year with Obit.
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