Vile Spirits — John MacLachlan Gray

Alcohol is once again legal in Vancouver after the failed experiment of prohibition, but pro-temperance sentiments remain strong. Politicians like Attorney General Gordon Cunning attempt appeasement by establishing the Liquor Control Board, which oversees supply, from the lofty circles of power down to bleak public drinking factories called “beer parlours.”

Then Cunning is found deceased, an empty martini glass at his side. Soon after, Mrs. Harlan Crombie, wife of a prominent bureaucrat, falls dead after an afternoon book club meeting. Is it pure coincidence that the deceased were both drinking the same brand of “tonic”? Or is it a spillover from American prohibition, where deliberately tainted booze is killing thousands?

In this spellbinding follow-up to his 2018 mystery The White Angel, John MacLachlan Gray again captures the spirit of Vancouver in those gritty, gin-soaked days, as the city was remaking itself between the wars.

Fans of The White Angel will be delighted by the return of straight-shooting constable Calvin Hook, frustrated poet-cum-reporter Ed McCurdy and unpredictable, eavesdropping telephone operator Mildred Wickstram, as they pool their skills in order to get to the truth.

Set against the turbulent global backdrop of the Spanish influenza epidemic, Gray has created a vivid portrait of the era when temperance activists, the Ku Klux Klan and the Liquor Control Board clashed on the mean streets of Vancouver—a rough little city on the edge of empire.