  Too Hot To Handle, by Mary Jane Maffini
RendezVous, 2007 ISBN 10: 1-894917-57-X;
ISBN 13: 978-1-894917-57-5 $15.95
Life is not going well for romance writer Fiona Silk at the moment. Her significant other is recovering from a bullet wound to the head, and has lost his memory—even of Fiona. Her municipal taxes are due, and she’s broke. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband is giving her a hard time on the divorce, and, as Too Hot to Handle opens, she’s getting an object lesson in road rage from a jerk in an SUV.
Then, as icing on the cake, so to speak, because her fiction writing career has tanked, her new agent as landed her a deal to write an erotic cookbook. She couldn’t have picked two subjects Fiona knows less about: cookery and erotica. (As an aside, this reviewer thought: an erotic cookbook! What a great idea, I bet I could write one. Half an hour later, I was commiserating with Fiona.)
Too Hot to Handle is the second in Mary Jane Maffini’s Fiona Silk series. If you’re familiar only with her Camilla MacPhee books, these are quite different. The action takes place in the fictional town of Ste. Aubaine, in West Quebec. It’s a thriving, picturesque community of artists, aging hippies, tourists and eccentrics. Right now, it’s also the location for the filming of a cable television cooking show, and the locals as well as the tourists are all agog at the celebrity chefs and assorted TV types who leave Fiona cold—until circumstances force her to confront them.
Things continue to go downhill for Fiona. It’s soon obvious that all her misfortunes are not bad luck, but persecution. She’s got a pretty good idea of who and why, too.
There’s not a lot of detecting going on in this crime novel. In fact, if you’re a fan of the traditional whodunnit, you’ll have to exercise patience, since the criminous part doesn’t really get going until about halfway through the novel. Somehow, though, that doesn’t matter. Too Hot to Handle is filled with a wonderful assortment of fun characters and lots of problems for Fiona to grapple with—which she does with admirable pluckiness. You’ll be too busy chuckling, or wondering what could possibly happen next, to get overly concerned about where the corpses are.
And, as a bonus, each chapter is preceded by an “erotic” recipe (presumably one intended for inclusion in the cookbook). You may be tempted to try a few, whether or not you have a lover to share them with.
  Haunted Harbours: Ghost Stories from Old Nova Scotia, by Steve Vernon.
Nimbus Publishing, 2007 ISBN: 1-55109-592-0 $14.95
Ghost stories—the “true” kind—are best told around a campfire, or on a dark and stormy winter night when the howling wind and starless sky can add to the atmosphere. The operative word here is told.
Maybe it’s the storyteller’s ability to modulate the voice, or use the body to add dimension to the tale, but somehow, for this reviewer, the written-down kind of ghost story almost always disappoints. They lose something in the writing: either the prose is flat, or the approach too academic, or the writer has an agenda that’s not kept well hidden.
Happily, this is not the case with Steve Vernon’s Haunted Harbours: Ghost Stories from old Nova Scotia.
Vernon is both a fiction writer and a storyteller, in the oral sense (and tradition) of the term. He demonstrates both these skills admirably in this collection. These tales sound as if they’re told aloud—eminently suitable for reading to a group, or to oneself (preferably with a hot rum toddy at one’s elbow).
The stories are not of haunted people, but of the ghosts themselves—how they came to be ghosts. Many are tales of the sea or the coast, and most date back quite a ways. There are pirates and Indians and witches and maidens; hangings and murders and dismemberments and lost loves—in short, all the elements you’d want in a good ghost story. Vernon doesn’t report them, he tells them—which means he has no misgivings about narrating what a long-dead person was thinking at the time, or putting into dialogue what was said when no one was around to hear. Many of the stories are, he freely admits, syntheses of variations on a tale. Vernon is not an historian, or folklorist, but a storyteller who entertains; and that’s the purpose of Haunted Harbours: to entertain. It does this very well.
Although the volume is slim—only 120 pages—a lot gets packed in there: twenty-one tales that are rich in detail. The one thing this reviewer would have liked to see is pictures or maps of the locations, which Vernon describes well enough to tempt anyone to spend their next vacation touring Nova Scotia; but, nevertheless, the occasional photograph would have added to the pleasure of reading this marvellous collection.
To discover more about these authors and their books, please visit their websites.
Steve Vernon: http://users.eastlink.ca/~stevevernon/index.html
Mary Jane Maffini: www.maryjanemaffini.ca
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