Ransom Game (1981)

Ransom Game by Howard Engel


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
"Ransom Game" was recommended to me by the owner of an independent book store in Stratford, Ontario. I was surprised to find that there are a number of good Canadian authors that aren't easily available or known in this country. Howard Engel is one of them.

His Benny Cooperman series is referred to "as an institution of Canuck crime writing" by NOW (Toronto).

Set in Grantham, near Niagara Falls, in the early 1980s, Benny is a Jewish boy in a Protestant town. An unassuming, laid-back private investigator, he doesn't stop until he gets to the bottom of a problem.

Author Howard Engel has a way with words and can turn a descriptive term on a dime. There are twelve titles in this series and it looks like Penguin Canada has begun to re-release them.

The author suffered a small stoke in 2000 that left him with "a rare disorder that rendered him able to write but unable to read". He had his PI Benny Cooperman suffer the same ailment in his 11th book in the series "The Cooperman Variations".


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