After-Image

Confessions of a Mystery Writer
Leona Gom is back with a new novel

Leona Gom confesses to a momentary feeling of panic, the first time she saw the cover of her novel After-Image and the words 'A Vicky Bauer Mystery'. Her mystery novels revolve around the slow discovery of character and conflict — what Raymond Chandler once referred to as "the country behind the hill." In her Vicky Bauer books you're as intrigued with the character and her evolving emotional situations as you are by the generic mandate that crimes be committed and corpses discovered.

Without wishing to seem sexist, Gom says she thinks women writers — often accused of introducing domestic elements in the past — have brought a sense of detail, character and human relationships to the mystery idiom.

Gom agrees that part of the continuing fascination with the mystery is that it touches a chord — that we all have a sense of hidden motives and luring unknowns playing a role in our lives and most of us would admit to having a few skeletons in the family closet.

PUBLISHERS IN STEP WITH GENRE-HOPPING AUTHORS

...none of the small-press authors offering up sleuths for fun and profit have the range of White Rock, BC resident Leona Gom, whose first Vicky Bauer mystery, After-Image, was released in April...

In After-Image, Bauer recovering alcoholic, graduate student of feminist film theory and schoolteacher's wife - witnesses a murder in the woods near Canadian Forces Base Lahr in Germany. However, when she reports the incident, no body can be found. Also, her occasional scrapes with the military police cast her as a less than trustworthy witness who might have imagined the crime.

So far in a writing career that has spanned 24 years, 10 books and 10 publishers, Gom has juggled poetry, short stories, the Western novel, the thriller, speculative fiction and now the mystery.

So, what joy when a book like Leona Gom's After Image comes along. A book with a feminist heroine who's politically correct but still has a sense of humour, who personifies all your left-leaning convictions while allowing you a good, old-fashioned, suspense-filled read. Best of all, while seducing you with wit, humour, and fine plotting, Gom's book attacks so many different stereotypes, it may even challenge some of your own, barely-acknowledged prejudices. After-Image is ... welter-weight reading with a kick. .