Crime and Other Pastimes — Mandy Sayer

Blending the popular genre of crime fiction with the art of the short story, Crime and Other Pastimes reveals the interconnecting lives and deaths of unforgettable characters within an inner-city community. After the corpse of a newborn baby is discovered in a nearby laneway, an adopted girl being raised in a funeral home finally appreciates the sanctity of her own life. A drug dealer goes missing, and his many clients plot an outrageous plan to ensure his safe return, with comically fatal results. A middle-aged playwright conspires with a young university student to commit a scandalous act of literary fraud. A man takes a live-in job at the local funeral home so he can eventually transport kilos of marijuana inside funeral home’s coffins. A co-dependent mother suspects her beloved and mentally ill son of murder, triggering a moral dilemma. In the final, novella-length story, a young couple decides to escape the grime and noise of the city and camp on the property of an uncle’s farm, to help the uncle search for his teenage niece who has mysteriously vanished without a trace.