Howard Engel is the award winning writer whose Benny Cooperman mysteries garner rave international reviews-fans stretch from Canada to Japan, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and the United States. His latest, Mr. Doyle and Dr. Bell, is a brilliant departure from the Cooperman series. The year is 1879 and in Edinburgh, Alan Lambert has been tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang for the murder of a dazzling opera star and her lover. But Lambert's brother believes he's innocent and pleads with Dr. Bell, a celebrated professor of anatomy, to uncover the truth. Bell agrees and sets out to crack the case with his keen powers of deduction and the help of his student, Arthur Conan Doyle.

For the second time, celebrated crime-fiction writer Howard Engel turns his hand to nonfiction. Setting out in the nineteenth century, Engel travels from France and England to Canada and the United States, with engaging detours along the way. As he discovers, le crime passionel, a concept originating in France, has a special place in many legal codes around the world. Engel explores more than twenty-five classic, infamous and still unresolved cases.

Canadian P.I. Benny Cooperman (Murder On Location, etc.) takes to the woods in this one - Algonquin National Park, where he's staying at primitive Petawawa Lodge and keeping an eye on super-successful evangelist Norbert Patten, head of the Ultimate Church. Patten's hiding out as he waits for a Supreme Court verdict on the validity of his church, hoping to dodge some bitter enemies at the same time. His return to the locale of his youth seems to trigger some macabre happenings. When the body of stoic Indian guide Aeneas DuFond is discovered in a culvert, Benny takes a closer look at some of the lodge's visitors - among others, we have commanding Maggie McCord and her nasty, no-good son George; Aeneas' schoolteacher brother Hector; illicit lovebirds Des and Delia and gorgeous, mysterious Aline Barbour.

Benny Cooperman's favourite lunch counter and diner have closed down and the fittings have been sold to Americans. The nation mourns the accidental death of its greatest artist, cellist Dermot Keogh. It's April and there's already a heat wave. Things are just not the way they used to be. Alas, not just the plots and settings have changed in Howard Engel's 10th Benny Cooperman mystery. While Canada's favourite fictional detective is still his smart-alecky but unsophisticated self ("Dim Sum may be unknown in Grantham, Mr. Cooperman, but we in Toronto have had it for nearly forty years"), his talents seem washed out, if not washed up, in this nasty little mystery set in the high-tech, high-pressure world of a Toronto TV station far up the road from his native Grantham. All the stock figures are the former high school love goddess who calls at the detective's office wondering if she's in the path of a killer, the small-town lawyer, the slobbish cops, the heavies in dark glasses. What's missing are the gritty small-town ambience and naked class antagonisms that drive best hard-boiled detective fiction, including Engel's early novels. Burdened with the bland homogeneity of the contemporary city and with convoluted literary references, the tale becomes progressively less gripping. In fact Cooperman hasn't been himself since 1990's Dead and Buried , when his creator first fell for the suits and the happy ending. The warning of his first sentence--"I should have seen the writing on the wall"--should have been a message to readers as well. --Robyn Gillam

Benny Cooperman is a detective with flair, known and loved the world over as a witty, egg salad-loving, Jewish gentleman sleuth. This kinder, gentler detective-funny, smart, and squeamish about violence-is the creation of master of the genre Howard Engel, and readers stretch now to thirteen countries, from his native Canada to Japan, England, Germany, Italy, Spain, Denmark, and the US.