Whodunit Book Club - November 25, 2014

The last Whodunit Book Club gathering of 2014!   Fourteen members attended and were treated to Christmas sweets thanks to our coordinator Pam.

Our book this month was "Cold Mourning" by Brenda Chapman and published by Dundurn Press.  Set in Canada's capital city during the week leading up to Christmas, it was a perfect novel to read this time of year.

The novel opens in 1995 in northern Canada where two young First Nations girls have accepted a lift from a stranger.  An action which brings about tragic and traumatic consequences for them both.
Skip ahead to chapter one and Kala Stonechild has just accepted a position on a special task force of the Ottawa police.  The reader immediately assumes that Kala is one of the two girls mentioned in the prologue.   Her name is apt.  Stonechild, a loner,  reveals little of herself.

The unit she is working for is headed by Jacques Rouleau.  A fair man, likeable and plagued with torment in both his private and professional life.  The others on her squad are wary of Kala at first but seem to develop a healthy respect for her as time goes by.

The first day on the job they are assigned a case of a missing Ottawa business man.  Their goal is to find him and have him home in time for Christmas.   Things are never as simple as they are at first glance and the squad are foiled at every turn.  When the businessman's body is found in the trunk of his car after he has frozen to death they have a plethora of suspects.  A highly dysfunctional family, some murky business deals and even murkier business partners.

The mystery was very well written with just the right amount of great descriptions and several plausible red herrings.   There were a lot of characters in the novel but the characters were so well drawn that the reader didn't become confused for a second.  The protagonists were engaging and likeable.   Tragic relationships abounded.

One grievance most of the Whodunit readers had with the book was the poor editing.  There were several typos, grammar errors and inconsistencies that were jarring and interrupted the flow of the otherwise faultless narrative.

"Cold mourning", the first in the Stonechild and Rouleau mystery series, is the first novel to employ a female First Nations sleuth in Canadian fiction! 

The 14 Whodunit Book Club members in attendance rated the novel out of a possible 10 points.   The average score was 7.5 out of 10 with two votes of a perfect ten among them.

"Butterfly Kills", the second novel in the series will be released on January 10, 2015.

The six lucky winners of book giveaways this evening were:
1. Nancy
2. Brenda
3. Laird
4. Heather
5. Gaye
6. Cathy

Congratulations all!

Whodunit will not have a meeting in December.  Our next Whodunit Book Club will be on January 27, 2015 when we will discuss "The Cuckoo's Calling" by Robert Galbraith (aka J.D. Rowling)

"He grassed me up!"

Anyone who has ever read a British mystery has probably heard the expression "he grassed me up!" or read someone described as being 'a grass'.
The phrase/term means someone who informs to the police.
I for one have always wondered where the expression originated.
Word and phrase origins are one of my interests, so when I chased this one down I thought I'd share it via blog. I found the answer on the website "Phrase finder".
Meaning:
Inform on someone to the police.
Origin:
In 2005, British newspapers picked up on a story about a burglar who had stolen cash, jewelery and an African Grey parrot from a house near Hungerford, Berkshire. David Carlile, widely described in the press as 'feather-brained', explained to the police that he knew that African Greys could talk and he didn't want the bird to 'grass him up'.
'Grassing up' has been a commonly used expression in the UK since the mid 20th century, but is less common elsewhere. The first known use of 'grass' in that context is Arthur Gardner's Tinker's Kitchen, 1932, which defined a grass as "an informer". Grass was a well-enough established word in the 1980s to have spawned 'supergrass', i.e. a republican sympathiser who later 'turned Queen's evidence' and informed on the IRA.
Informers are variously known as squealers, noses, moles, rats, snouts and stool pigeons. These terms invoke imagery of covert snooping around and of talking. Grass is less intuitive. It could just have arisen from 'snake in the grass', which derives from the writings of Virgil and has been known in English, meaning traitor, since the late 17th century.
There is another route to the word and this is via rhyming slang. Farmer and Henley's 1893 Dictionary of Slang defines 'grasshopper' as 'copper', i.e. policeman. The theory is that a 'grass' is someone who works for the police and so has become a surrogate 'copper'. The rhyming slang link was certainly believed in 1950 by the lexicographer Paul Tempest, when he wrote Lag's lexicon: a comprehensive dictionary and encyclopaedia of the English prison to-day:
"Grasser. One who gives information. A 'squealer’ or ‘squeaker'. The origin derives from rhyming slang: grasshopper - copper; a 'grass' or 'grasser' tells the 'copper' or policeman."
That comes only a few years after the term grass was coined and there seems little reason to doubt it as the derivation. The original users of the term 'grass up' were from the London underworld and would have certainly been better acquainted with rhyming slang than the works of Virgil.