Freeze Frame

Upon reading only a few lines in a crime novel by a woman, one can easily dismiss this ... as just another production from the "woman's corner"... But the crime novels of this Canadian differ from the dreary average. With Gom the corniness is replaced by intelligent, often painful humour. Instead of wordy character analysis her work delivers convincing reactions to convincing challenges. When her lonely heroine seeks social contact, she shows genuine awkwardness, not the thoroughly false hormone-driven hysteria peppered with contempt for men that we see in bad crime novels as female social behaviour. Leona Gom's books are sensitive, painstakingly accurate in their language, and more than a little funny. And the questions they raise about power and force are treated with some urgency.