Cut to the Bone: A Hollis Grant Mystery

Boswell’s fourth Hollis Grant mystery (after 2009’s Cut to the Chase) finds the crime-solving painter having changed her life to become the superintendent of an innocuous Toronto apartment building, living there with her newly adopted foster daughter, 11-year-old Jay Brownelly. Also in the building is a discreet coterie of prostitutes, whose common determination to avoid violent predators doesn’t prevent one of them, Sabrina Trepanier, from being brutally murdered. Det. Rhona Simpson, with whom Hollis has previously clashed, arrives to investigate, but finds herself struggling with the Native American, or in Canadian parlance “First Nation,” heritage she shares with many of the sex workers at risk. Hollis discovers in the course of the case, meanwhile, that the police often place crimes involving minorities on the back burner. While the plotting rarely surprises, and Hollis’s tone sometimes becomes patronizing toward the story’s victims of injustice, the book stands out in its genre for tackling the unfamiliar subject of Canadian racial attitudes. (Nov.)