July 29, 2026
A Study in Red, by Connie Gault
A Study in Red, by Connie Gault, begins after a hot summer night in 1962, and a man who is dead in the morning. The pieces of the puzzle, the mystery, not yet locked into place—there is a woman who is fleeing, leaving her life, moving to an isolated cottage in rural Saskatchewan, and she’s been given a new name. She’s dyed her hair even blonder, and the ladies in the salon say she looks like Marilyn Monroe, whose own death will come over the news wires shortly. Narrating her experience like a character in a film noir, Amy Bell tells the story of how Amy Bell came to be.
And in a more contemporary time, a writer called Carol is recalling that very same summer as she lives under the weight of Long Covid and learns that Hattie has died, her death reported in the New York Times. Hattie, a popular novelist whom Carol had known through her aunt. That fateful summer, Carol, her younger sister, and their mother, had come to stay with the aunt at Hattie’s compound north of Edmonton. (Hattie spent her winters in California.) Where there were cottages, a swimming pool, where 13-year-old Carol was becoming aware of lust and desire as she eavesdropped on adult conversations, and she witnessed something terrible that was never spoken of again.
In a novel that’s both mystery and meditation, Connie and Amy attempt to solve (and then ever complicate) the puzzle of what really happened that summer, that night. Following her Toronto Book Award-nominated The Rasmussen Papers, A Study in Red is an examination of sisterhood, memory, narrative, and violence, and it’s both wonderfully strange and so compelling.
(It’s also one of our July giveaways at 49thShelf! Canadian readers can enter to win a copy here!)
