I like books set in cities I have lived in, particularly when the author is brave enough to go into real detail. The density of literati living in and passing through Boston means that I have a wealth of books to renew my fading memories of that city. Before I left Ottawa, I picked up the first two books by Karen Irving (actually, I wandered into a local bookshop and found her signing books.) She writes about the Ottawa I lived in, in and around Bank street and the Glebe, right down to the buses, and I’m sure I know the building that Katy has her office in. Hence picking up the third Katy Klein Mystery was a no-brainer.

Because not only do I get to play virtual tourist, I like her heroine and I like her writing style. Heroine first: intriguingly – and the reason that this scientist would probably never have picked up the books on her own – she’s an astrologist. Was a psychologist, eventually burned out in the aftermath of sexual harrassment, and turned to astrology as a means of helping people without the therapeutic burden, or the need to deal with insitutional politics. She’s on the vulnerable side, tends to retreat rather than to confront, but will fight fiercely when cornered or to protect the people she cares about. In Mars she is reeling from the repercussions of events in the previous book, and desperately trying not to be drawn towards danger and loss again; though she’s neither a coward nor a whiner, she simply has been through too much. She seems quite real: an ordinary woman of sensitivity and conscience who doubts her own strength.

As to the writing, Irving’s style is clean, descriptive (uses colour), and can rise to passages of considerable emotional intensity, as in the closing pages of Jupiter’s Daughter where the discovery of the murderer proves tragic, for the murderer and for Katy