Last Song Sung

March 15, 2018
A detective duo probes a very cold case, the disappearance of a rising singer/songwriter more than half a century ago.Feb. 28, 1965. Ellie Foster is smoking a cigarette in an alley outside a folk club called The Depression. As she waits between sets, hoping her friend Joni Anderson--who will later become Joni Mitchell--will arrive in time to see her perform, she's punched, and her world goes black. Then she disappears, and her family has no idea if she's alive or dead. Fifty-plus years later, laid-back Calgary investigators Adam Cullen and Mike Cobb (Dead Air, 2017, etc.) are visited by Ellie's granddaughter, Monica Brill, who's looking for answers. Not wanting to waste Monica's money, the duo agree to work for a week and let her know whether they find anything warranting further investigation. Their questioning of Ellie's old friends and fellow musicians is an evocative dive into a bygone era, but it yields no results for several days. Then Cullen and Cobb hit pay dirt with writer Lois Beeston, who spent years working on a book about The Depression. Her research notes point the duo in the right direction, providing them with a whole new list of suspects and potential witnesses. A club called The Tumbling Mustard and the folk singer Paula Pendergast, who performed with Ellie, put the detective duo on a path to learning the truth.Poulsen's third installment, short on plot but long on engaging character portraits, brims with nostalgia for a fondly remembered era set forth in a relaxed, amiable style.

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June 18, 2018
The captivating third mystery (following Dead Air) in Poulsen’s series featuring Mike Cobb, an ex-cop turned private investigator, and Adam Cullen, a freelance journalist, begins when a young woman named Monica Brill asks Cobb to find her grandmother, who was kidnapped in Calgary, Alberta, in 1965. At first hesitant to take on such a cold case, Cobb becomes intrigued with the mystery of how Monica’s grandmother, Ellie Foster, an aspiring folksinger, was forced into a car in the alley behind the folk coffee club where she was billed with Joni Anderson (later known as Joni Mitchell). But 51 years later, the club has long since closed; possible witnesses are, for the most part, dead or no longer lucid; and clues are scarce except for a CD someone put in Monica’s car. She is certain it is a recording of Ellie. Aided by Cullen’s music savvy, Cobb and Cullen immerse themselves in the ’60s music scene and find an unexpected political connection to Ellie’s disappearance. This tense, suspenseful story has plenty of humor and offers vivid glimpses into Canadian music history.

March 1, 2018
The third novel in the Cullen and Cobb series opens in 1965, when a popular singer, Ellie Foster, vanishes. Jumping forward several decades, Foster's granddaughter hires Mike Cobb, a cop-turned-private-eye, to dig into the case. As usual, Cobb recruits his buddy, crime writer Adam Cullen, to assist. Told in the first person by Cullen (Watson to Cobb's Holmes), the story follows the investigation as it reaches back in time to pick up the missing woman's trail and follow it to its end?at least that's the plan. The mystery is intriguing and well structured, but it's the team of Cullen and Cobb who really sell the novel. Poulsen has clearly built these two characters with care?their relationship is much more subtle than the stereotypical brains-and-brawn combo. The two bounce banter off one another in the manner of old friends, like Robert B. Parker's Spenser and Hawk, and they both bring plenty of savvy to the task at hand. Fans of detecting duos who don't know Cullen and Cobb need to make their acquaintance immediately.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)