A bi-weekly guide to the latest crime fiction releases.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/books/new-in-crime-fiction/article1345252/

If you're in the mood for a cute chick-lit mystery with some nice gals in Montreal, Hit & Mrs. is just the ticket. This third novel by Cape Breton's Lesley Crewe follows in the footsteps of light fare like Olivia Goldsmith's First Wives' Club. The “Book Bags” are four Montreal friends of a certain age who have known each other since grade school. Linda, Bette, Gemma and Augusta have kids and parents and in-laws and plenty of problems, but when they head to New York for a weekend getaway, they kill a cabbie and wind up in no end of trouble.

The Cape Breton Post

SYDNEY — In this country, a book achieves bestseller status once 5,000 copies have left the store shelves.
Well, Cape Breton author Lesley Crewe is three-for-three.
And nothing less is expected from book number four, entitled Hit & Mrs., due out in stores this week. A special book release event will take place Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Savoy Theatre in Glace Bay.
“The books are doing really well,” an ever-modest Crewe said of her first three novels,  Relative Happiness, Shoot Me, and Ava Comes Home.
A resident of Homeville, Crewe has called Cape Breton home for more than 30 years but grew up in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, more commonly known as NDG, a residential neighbourhood of Montreal located in the city’s west end. Crewe recalls it as a diverse community made up of people of all cultures and backgrounds.
“I do cherish my memories from growing up in Montreal. I just loved it. It was full of life,” she said.
And it was with those memories that Crewe approached her latest novel, which is a bit of a departure from her first three books which were all set in Cape Breton.
“This one’s different,” she explained. “I grew up in Montreal and I wanted to celebrate the women I grew up around. I wanted to celebrate these women that I remembered so fondly and I wanted to see if my readers would follow me somewhere else.”
Set in Montreal, Crewe said Hit and Mrs. is an over-the-top, fun book about four childhood friends — Linda, Bette, Gemma and Augusta — who are all about to turn 50 and decide to take a trip to New York City. Describing them as bigger-than-life characters, Crewe said each woman has her own set of troubles. Married to a doctor, Linda is the one who seems to have everything but is dealing with a cheating husband; Gemma has five kids and a meddling mother-in-law; Bette is single and living with her parents; and Augusta is a widow trying to cope with losing the love of her life.
“They all decided over wine to do something to cheer themselves up,” said Crewe.
But an innocent baggage mix-up at the airport with a young mother who’s actually smuggling diamonds for the mob, and things quickly go terribly wrong for the vacationing women, who soon realize this is not going to be the trip of shopping and Broadway shows they’d expected. A series of miscommunications and mishaps entangles the friends even further into the criminal underworld of New York.
Hit and Mrs. has been described “wildly entertaining comedic romp.”
Crewe, who is currently at work on the second draft of a screenplay of Relative Happiness for a company interested in making a movie based on the book, said she’s thrilled with the success the books have had but notes that’s not what motivates her.
“I never thought any of these would be published. I wrote them for myself,” she said. “The greatest satisfaction is when I’m sitting at a desk writing a story that I thought of myself.”
Terrilee Bulger, sales and marketing manager with Nimbus Publishing, which has published all of Crewe’s books, said Crewe has been a hit with readers right from the start.
“She’s very readable and her characters are very likeable. There’s a lot of realistic emotion in the books. There’s humour mixed with tragedy too and that mix appeals to readers,” she said. “We love Lesley and we hope that she’ll do many more books with us.”

ljgrant@cbpost.com

Hit & Mrs.

Originally published in The Quill and Quire (Fall 2009) by Carline Skelton, a writer based in B.C.

Lesley Crewe's latest novel is about the bonds of friends and family - and the butt-kicking potential of a little pepper spray and a lot of frothing maternal instinct.

Best friends Bette, Gemma, Augusta, and Linda set out for a long weekend in New York City - a break from their Montreal lives, and a celebration of their 40th birthdays. The plan: shopping, theatre, and a stay at the Waldorf, all charged to a cheating husband's Visa Platinum.

But when Better accidentally swaps bags with a diamond smuggler in La Guardia airport, and Gemma kills a gangster with pepper spray under and overpass, the therapeutic vacation takes a dark turn. And as if illicit diamonds and dead bodies weren't scary enough, the friends discover that the trip's unwitting financier, Linda's philandering husband, is also staying at the Waldorf with his twentysomething girlfriend.

The fourth novel from Lesley Crewe, a Cape Breton writer who grew up in Montreal, reads like madcap chick lit with a dash of cozy mystery. (Think a Debbie Macomber rewrite of Snatch.) Brimming with slapstick humour, and charging along with cacophonous momentum, it demands a comfy chair and a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Crewe's writing has the breathless tenor of a kitchen-table yarn. Phrases like "madder than a wet hen" and "scared shitless" do much of the descriptive duties, but although evocative detail is sparse, a cinematic pace and crackling dialogue keep readers hooked.

Naturally, this whirlwind tale has a cast of caricatures: dummy henchmen, neurotic crime bosses, and eccentric family members. Some are overblown - the goofy group of punk rockers, for instance - but most fit Crewe's style of zany comedy.

The four lifelong friends use their wits, mothers' intuition, and the contents of their purses to de-claw the New York Mafia - and, in the process, they rekindle their affection for that other imprefect mob of children, husbands, parents, and in-laws waiting fo rthem back in Montreal.

Perhaps the moral of this big-hearted caper is never leave home without pepper spray, a sense of humour, and a few great friends.

Lesley’s Crew

From the relatively happy Lexie Ivy to starlet Ava Harris, author Lesley Crewe knows how to create characters. Her latest cast takes on New York City in Crewe’s new novel Hit & Mrs.

By Anne-Marie Hood
Originally published in Atlantic Books Today (Fall 2009)

Lelsey Crewe is one of Atlantic Canada’s best selling authors. Yes, quite an achievement for a gal who writes books to simply avoid housework. “Some people knit; I just happen to write stories, and I never put pressure on myself to get them published."

Crewe’s family and friends believed she was destined to be a writer and she admits that she was a bit reluctant to believe them, but she eventually edged her way into the world of writing.

Her writing career started in 2000 with The Cape Bretoner Magazine and for five years, she wrote a column about family life called “Home Fires.”

She remembers the day that she realized that she was a true writer, which occurred while enroute to Walmart. She had a shouting match with her heroine who refused to marry the man chosen to be her husband. To Crew’s chagrin, her heroine won the argument and the whole book was rewritten.

Crewe diligently worked on her first novel, Relative Happiness. She chose her beloved as the setting and it was published in 2005. Her de but novel received rave reviews and in 2006 was reprinted and shortlisted for the Margaret and John Savage First Book Award. And the success continues, as plans are underway for her to write the second draft of a screenplay for the movie based on this book.

Vagrant Press published her first book and the three that followed. Crewe’s notoriety in writing hilarious fiction with down-to-earth characters heightened with the release of Shoot Me in 2006 followed by Ava Comes Home in 2008.

She said she decided to rattle the cage and wrote Hit & Mrs., due to be released in September 2009. It’s outrageously funny, and could come with a buyer beware: Reading this book may result in uncontrollable laughter.

Four zany life-long friends, Linda, Better, Gemma and Augusta live in Montreal and are all turning fifty. They feel a big celebration is in order and plan a trip to New York. They envision Broadway plays and fabulous shopping at Saks on 5th Avenue. Money is no object, as Linda offers to pay the whole vacation with her philandering husband’s Platinum Visa Card.

Bette’s bag gets accidentally switched in a LaGuardia washroom. A series of mishaps and miscommunications land the women straight in the hands of the Mob, and from there things to wild as the friends get involved in one comic adventure after another.

This book is filled with memorable characters. Crewe’s personal favourite is Ida Weinberg who is composite of the passionate women that lived in the Jewish neighbourhood in Montreal/span> where she grew up. Ida and her husband, Izzy, appear to have a love-hate relationship, but bond together lie Superglue to protect their loved ones.

Crewe is frequently asked to write sequels to all her books but syas that she probably never will. “If a reader loves a particular character, it’s like they ‘own’ that character. I don’t want to mess with their fantasy of what ‘their’ character should be doing.”

She graduated from Concordia University with a Bachelor of Education Degree and has lived in Cpae Breton for over thirty years. When she’s not writing, enjoys spending time with her family and pets. She is an avid reader and crazy about books, and collects the old nursery rhyme books that she fondly remembers from her childhood.

Crewe currently writes “Lesley’s Letters” for Cahoots, an online women’s magazine. She’s in the middle of writing another novel called The Wedding March, and Her Mother’s Daughter is ready to go for 2010.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6TH, 2008 THE CAPE BRETON POSTbr> t blend of laughs, tears

KEN CHISHOLM
The Cape Breton Post

Hollywood tongues are wagging over Oscar-winning starlet Ava Harris’s sudden departure from Tinseltown’s red carpets.
Her favourite arm candy, studly Hayden Judd, is desolate.
The bizarre buzz is Ava privately jetted to the frozen Canadian north to some berg called Glace Bay (sounds positively glacial, non?) to comfort her dying mom.
OK, I’ll end my attempt at E-talk right there, but you get the idea. The heroine of Lesley Crewe’s new novel, Ava Comes Home (Vagrant Press), leaves Hollywood behind when, after a 10-year absence, a family emergency plops her in Cape Breton.
Besides reconciling with her terminally ill mother — and numerous siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles — Ava, born Libby MacKinnon, must confront the dark, searingly painful secret that tore her from Seamus, the only man she ever loved.
Crewe, who grew up in Montreal and now lives and writes in Homeville, Cape Breton, writes forcefully, full of local detail — everything from the Tasty Treat to Jacobson’s make an appearance — and with great psychological insight.
She also expertly manages a page-turning blend of down-home comedy and heart-breaking romance.
The comedy rises from the culture clash of Ava’s “entourage” (assistant and best bud, Lola, and stylists Harold and Maurice), unused to genuinely decent, honest folk like Libby’s family, who insist on feeding them colossal amounts of delicious home cooking.
The secret keeping Libby/Ava and Seamus apart propels the novel and, despite the evidence cannily put in plain sight, I never guessed it.
And when revealed, it actually raised the emotional stakes to a point where I thought they could not be resolved.
But then Crewe brilliantly stages a dramatic climax that . . . well, read the book.
Crewe says she chose Hollywood as a setting to put her main character as far away from her Cape Breton home as possible and in a business where a long absence seemed plausible.
Like her other two novels, Relative Happiness and Shoot Me, Crewe says comedy and dark emotions go hand in hand because “that’s what life is like.
“I’m writing about families,” she says. “And families are about laughter and tears.”
To promote her new novel, Crewe will travel across most of Canada.
But she starts in Glace Bay with the official launch Sept. 25, at 7 p.m. at the Old Town Hall on McKeen Street.
And being Cape Breton, there will be no red carpet, but there will be tea and lunch served.

VANCOUVER — The protagonist in Lesley Crewe’s first novel is easy to like. Lexie Ivy is a plus-size woman who lives in Glace Bay, N.S., with her plus-size cat, Sophie. She works at the library, acts in plays, hooks rugs, enjoys a glass of wine and drives a van named Betsy.
In the course of a brilliantly successful makeover, she banishes figure-hiding “tablecloth” dresses from her wardrobe. And, despite being envious of her three slim, pretty sisters, she doesn’t do too badly in the romance department.
Crewe said that “Lexie is pretty much me.” Which makes Relative Happiness “about as close to autobiographical as you’re gonna get.”
Since the book came out in 2005, Crewe has solidified her status as an author. Last year, Vagrant published Shoot Me. It’s a lighthearted farce about an elderly anthropologist named Hildy who comes home to Halifax to die, moving into her great-niece Elsie’s rambunctious household. Unseemly scrambling occurs when she announces she has hidden “treasure” in the comfy old house and it’s there for the finding.  
“I love Aunt Hildy,” said Crewe, 51. “I’ve met a few of these old dolls in my time.”
The author grew up in Montreal and moved to Cape Breton Island about 30 years ago. She and her husband, John, love country living.
In 2000, after submitting an article to the Cape Bretoner magazine, she was offered a column. She took up the challenge, and Home Fires — a series of funny takes on family life — appeared until the magazine’s demise in 2005.
Formerly a stay-at-home mother, Crewe was delighted to see what she could do with words.
“One day in 2003, I just sat down at the computer. I didn’t intend to write a book, but two months later (Relative Happiness) was done. That’s how I do it: 18-hour days for two months.”
Crewe grew up reading Rosamunde Pilcher and Maeve Binchy.
She doesn’t categorize her work with that of Alistair MacLeod, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Donna Morrissey and other big-name Maritime authors. She notes that “a lot of Cape Breton books are full of angst and hard times.”  
Hers are warm and upbeat. They’re about mothers and daughters, girlfriends and colleagues — and a place where people are close to the land and the ocean, drink endless cups of tea and put on plays when they need to raise money.
Crewe has completed a third and fourth manuscript and is writing a fifth.

rwigod@png.canwest.com

Comedy and tragedy
Shoot Me combines both in hilarious, intelligent tale
By BRUCE ERSKINE