BY SUE CARTER
Knock on the door of Maureen Jennings’s house, and expect to be greeted by Murdoch, a whip-thin grey Labradoodle with soulful eyes. Jennings laments that he isn’t the brightest, but Murdoch performs tricks, like barking answers to basic arithmetic questions.
Jennings’s Victorian brick house is standard fare in her charming Toronto neighbourhood. Originally a farming community, the former village was annexed by the city of Toronto in 1888, seven years before the setting of her debut mystery novel, Except the Dying (1997), which introduced the world to her dog’s fictional namesake, detective William Murdoch. Christie Pits is nearby, a former quarry turned public park named after biscuit mogul William Mellis Christie, who co-founded the Christie & Brown Cookie Company in 1861. A racially motivated riot in that park’s history plays a role in Jennings’s new novel, Heat Wave, the first title in her planned Paradise Café trilogy, and the first with her new publisher, Cormorant Books.