Maritime Murder: Deadly Crimes from the Buried Past
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by Steve Vernon
Nimbus Publishing, Halifax, 2012 208 pp., illus., $17.95 paperback
As happens to many authors while conducting research, Steve Vernon came across interesting material that he couldn’t use in the course of his usual projects. In Vernon’s case, his usual genre is ghost stories. Fortunately, he saved up these ghost-less tales of murder and mayhem to create Maritime Murder, a collection of nineteen short truecrime stories from Atlantic Canada between 1791 and 1936.
Vernon’s writing style has a storyteller quality, and his prose is brisk. Lively descriptions of characters decorate the pages and include passages such as “up the hoop with another man’s child” and “he … sported a great, bushy moustache that looked as if it might have been ripped off the wrong end of a grizzly bear.”
Maritime Murder is a good reading choice for a dark, cozy winter night.
— Tanja Hütter (Read bio)
Tanja Hütter is Online Manager for Canada's History Society and a pragmatic idealist.