LADY JAIL

Farrow’s brutal take on the locked-room mystery presents a murder committed inside a secure group ward in the Joliette Institution for Women near Montreal in 1994.

Lady Jail doesn’t confine its residents in separate cells but parcels them out in group quarters, like the one in which eight women doing time together suddenly find their number abruptly reduced to seven. Someone has strangled Florence, who’s locked up for throwing acid in a rival’s face, in the group bathroom using a length of wire that's been smuggled in. The killer is clearly one of the other prisoners—senior inmate Doi, who attacked her daughter with a hatchet; Malka, the next oldest, who poisoned her husband; Temple, who smuggles guns for the mob; Rozlynn, who celebrated her 18th birthday by killing her father; Courtney, who stabbed her best friend to death when she caught her flirting; her inseparable pal, Jodi, who shot a man during her boyfriend’s convenience-store robbery; and newcomer Abigail, an embezzler who’s still hiding the millions she stole—unless it’s really correctional officer Isaure Dabrezil, who’s working at Lady Jail during her yearlong suspension from the Sûreté du Québec. The job of figuring out whodunit is given to DS Émile Cinq-Mars, of the Montreal Police Service fraud squad, because he arrested Abi and because Dabrezil’s presence would render any SQ investigation problematic. Farrow keeps the story’s development as intense as the claustrophobic setting until he’s ready to unleash a bravura, hyperextended denouement.

A wonderful corrective for your pandemic-induced cabin fever. Yes, things could be much, much worse.