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Canadian Authors - Mystery - |
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Menopause Is Murder |
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| Menopause is Murder: A Crime and Mystery Collection The Ladies Killing Circle Series Edited by Vicki Cameron and Mary Jane Maffini General Store Publishing House, October 1999 ISBN 1894263057 Reviewed by Devorah Stone Post-menopausal women don’t usually commit murder. Young men fill our prisons, not grandmothers. Or maybe they get away with it. I’m almost at this age, so for me reading Menopause is Murder was a foreshadowing of things to come. At middle age, women and men have built up decades of resentments and petty jealousies seething under a veil of socially acceptable behavior. The social and financial gulfs between friends and relatives that were mere annoyances in younger days are now of prime importance. As age creeps up, the hope of one day doing better fades and all your past failures haunt you. Older people have so many more motives for murder than young people do. This wonderful collection of stories explores all those mature feelings of resentment, hatred, jealousy and lust. There are stories about women from all social classes and backgrounds, from a bathtub race on Vancouver Island to rum smuggling in the Maritimes, to political intrigue in Ottawa to a wedding in Toronto. Some of these women have grown children and others never had any. Some live in rural areas, others in suburbs and some in the center of town. There are women who worked all their lives in dead end jobs, or who had husbands who fell short of being good bread winners, and other women in the have everything but still feeling left out and dissatisfied. A simple wedding turns into grounds for murder, as does a boat cruise and a farmers wives' meeting. These are women who have waited almost a life- time for revenge and many don’t want to grow old gracefully. In almost all the stories, these women get away with murder. I kept routing for the murderer because I felt all those emotions and understood the motives. I'm looking forward to it all! |
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