From The Toronto Globe and Mail today - review by Margaret Cannon

THE K HANDSHAPE

By Maureen Jennings, Dundurn, 365 pages, $22.95

Series authors who leave behind the safety of the sure thing for new characters or stand-alone novels are always to be commended. Writers who can maintain the quality of writing over a long series (Tony Hillerman is the king here) are rare. So it was no surprise when Maureen Jennings, a rising star in the Canadian crime-writing community, put aside her much-lauded and loved Victorian detective William Murdoch for a modern young woman named Christine Morris. The first Morris novel, Does Your Mother Know?, debuted last year and had a problem or three. The good news is that, in The K Handshake, Jennings has solved them. This is a story that shows what she can do with new characters, place and time.

The opening, set in a freezing lake outside Orillia, Ont., is as chilly to the blood as the soul. Morris, a Toronto police forensic profiler, has been called by a colleague, forensic psychiatrist Leo Forgach, because his daughter Deirdre is missing. They trace her to Casino Rama and then to the lake, where her body, the pockets stuffed with rocks, is found. But Deirdre Forgach isn't a suicide. She was strangled and her body dumped.

Jennings opens the story with the crime scene, and that enables her to emphasize that Morris, along with the rest of the crime team, knows very little about Leo Forgach. Deirdre was his child, but they were estranged and she was deaf. It's a surprise to Christine that Deirdre has a child, also deaf. It's more surprising to discover that the child was deliberately conceived to be deaf, a political statement on the rights of the deaf and the advancement of deaf culture. She had her supporters, but her father wasn't one of them. Could he possibly kill his own child and make Christine his witness? Or is there something even more devious in Deirdre's past that caused her death?

The politics of the deaf is a fascinating focus for a mystery novel - the title refers to the American Sign Language hand symbol for the word "kill" - and Jennings has, as usual, done her research well. Christine Morris is a more focused and complete character this time out, and it should come as no surprise that she's about to become a TV character, just like Detective Murdoch and Kathy Reichs's Temperance Brennan.