Verdict in Blood (Joanne Kilbourn Mysteries) - Hardcover

Bowen, Gail

3.81

426 ratings by Goodreads

9780771014871: Verdict in Blood (Joanne Kilbourn Mysteries)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771014872 ISBN 13: 9780771014871

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 1998

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Verdict in Blood is Gail Bowen’s sixth novel featuring Joanne Kilbourn, one of Canada’s most beloved sleuths. Teacher, friend, lover, single mother, and now grandmother, Joanne has a quick intelligence and a boundless compassion, which repeatedly get her into – and out of – trouble.

In Verdict in Blood, Joanne’s good friend Hilda McCourt is visiting her in Regina, Saskatchewan, when Judge Justine Blackwell’s corpse is found sprawled across one of the limestone slabs of the Boy Scout memorial in Wascana Park. Blackwell, known for the harsh sentences she’s handed down over the years, had lately been seeking out people she’d once incarcerated and trying to help them. Had she had a genuine change of heart, or had she been getting senile? Even the fearsome judge herself had wondered. Just the night before her death, she’d asked Hilda to make an assessment of her mental condition.

Now she’s dead, the matter is urgent: Which of her two wills should prevail – the one leaving everything to her daughters, including the famous sixties singer Lucy Blackwell, or the one leaving it all to Culhane House, a halfway house for ex-cons? Whoever stood to lose could be her murderer, and Hilda has to decide. Before too long, Joanne (who has problems enough of her own with her lover, Alex, and his troubled nephew, Eli) finds herself once again embroiled in intrigue.

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Review:

Joanne Kilbourn is a 51-year-old professor of political science, broadcaster, mother, lover, and amateur crime solver based in Regina, Saskatchewan. She's an original and immensely appealing character, totally believable in all her roles. In five previous installments, author Gail Bowen has supplied such a convincing array of details about her family, friends, and the landscape they inhabit that we slip into Joanne's life as easily as knocking on a neighbor's door.

The plot of this sixth book in the series is also strong on family and friends: when a tough judge, Justine Blackwell, suddenly softens up after 30 years on the bench and supports a prisoners' rights group, attacks from her three angry daughters make her doubt her own mental competence. Judge Blackwell turns to an elderly teacher and mentor, Hilda McCourt, for advice. McCourt is staying with her friend Kilbourn when they both get the news that Judge Blackwell has been battered to death in a public park. A group of ex-prisoners who had been incarcerated by the judge seem to have reasons to want Blackwell dead, but so do the Lear-like daughters, especially a former rock star and a discredited psychiatrist.

In addition to helping McCourt sift through the evidence, and then having to deal with another brutal attack, Joanne is also caught up in the psychological problems of the fragile 15-year-old nephew of her policeman lover. In all the turmoil, she still has time to become a grandmother, a scene described with as much honest emotion and artistry as the rest of Bowen's engrossing book. Other Kilbourn outings include Deadly Appearances, A Colder Kind of Death, and A Killing Spring. --Dick Adler

From the Back Cover:

“A deeply involving novel...Bowen has supplied such a convincing array of details about [Joanne Kilbourn’s] family, friends and the landscape they inhabit that we slip into her life as easily as knocking on a neighbor’s door.”
–Publishers Weekly

“Bless Gail Bowen, she does it all: genuine human characters, terrific plots with coherent resolutions, and good, sturdy writing.”
–Joan Barfoot in the London Free Press

“An author in full command of her metier. Like a master chef, Gail Bowen has taken disparate elements...and combined them seamlessly.”
–Calgary Herald

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