The Calling

By Inger Ash Wolfe

Simon is there to help you, to relieve your pain and suffering, to enable you to pass over painlessly when you are suffering from an incurable, painful, and fatal disease. He is an angel of mercy. Or is he?
Delia Chandler is dying of cancer. She has nothing to look forward to except more and increasing pain and death. She turned to Simon for release and he obliged her. But to the police this is murder and Hazel Micallef, the head of the local police department, is going to do her best to track down the man who came into her quiet Canadian town and committed this crime.
Simon is a man on a mission. He isn't out just to help the suffering, not at all. For he has a bizarre plan, a plan requiring the defilement of the bodies of his victims, a plan that has left a trail of bodies across the breadth of Canada. The only thing that will get in his way is Hazel Micallef and her detectives.
Hazel Micallef has troubles of her own, including unrest in her department, a sometime drinking problem, a failed marriage, an aching back, and a feisty mother who is trying to manage her daughter's life and who lives with her. Between trying to solve the most important case to ever come her way and juggle her own problems and insecurities and her increasing back pain, Hazel is tested to the limits.

This was a pretty good story, with a very disturbing and weird killer and a sympathetic and down to earth heroine in Hazel. Trying to figure out just exactly what Simon was really up to, beside being an angel of mercy, was intriguing right up the revelation of his motives, which turn out to be really offbeat, something I never would have guessed. Simon is probably one of the strangest killers in fiction to come along since that nut in Silence of the Lambs, Buffalo Bill. Some of the things Simon does to his victims makes for pretty grim reading, but that is par for the course for thriller novels. But the gore is less important than the puzzle of Simon's true motives and I will remember Simon for a long time.

New Words

Damiana: an herb used for tea and for medicinal and recreational reasons. For more details see Wikipedia. 'He put a tiny amount of the damiana in it and covered it with hot water. "It tastes like chamomile," she said.'

Shibboleth: a slogan, motto, or saying, especially one distinctive of a particular group; a password, phrase, custom or usage that reliably distinguishes the members of one group or class from another. 'A framed sampler hung on the wall over the piano, a shibboleth.'

Mimosas: a mixed drink containing champagne and orange juice. 'Ray Greene had brunch with his mother every Sunday. Drove out to The Poplars to get her, and took her to Riverside House for mimosas and pancakes.'

Asclepias milkweed. 'The eastern provinces were a better source for some of the mosses and lichens he could not find in such abundance out west. Club moss and Asclepias. He scoured the forest floor for seedpods, herbs, and fungus.'

Titrated and chloroform water: to titrate is to determine the concentration of a substance in a solution and Chloroform water is an aqueous solution of chloroform containing approximately 1 part in 200; it tastes sweet and is used to make foul tasting drugs taste better. 'He made the tincture with chloroform water and sodium carbonate, then titrated it. The herb's bitter scent filled the inside of the tent.'

Secondment: the detachment of a person from their regular organization for temporary assignment elsewhere. '"We're a secondment factory now, Ray. If Ian Mason isn't going to send me what I need, I'll beg, borrow, and steal it.'"