In Blue Moon, McMaster University professor James King imagines Evelyn Dick's version of the murders for which she was tried three times and convicted twice. He infers more, but stays true to facts in Marjorie Freeman Campbell's Torso, the popular 1974 account. The murder mystery is attached to the fictional life of a woman who matures in Kingston's Prison for Women and moves to Vancouver at the end of her sentence. Evelyn Dick becomes the acclaimed Canadian author Elizabeth Delamere, whose secret identity is now revealed posthumously in a memoir left with her psychoanalyst.

Of course, in her account of the Torso Murders, Elizabeth/Evelyn is innocent. Her greatest sin was to have aspirations beyond her station. The actions of Hollywood starlets seen on the Tivoli's silver screen were, for Evelyn, life-lessons to be realized through little schemes hatched after the show in a restaurant booth across the street. But she was only one of many who wanted something bigger than the lifestyle afforded by working in Hamilton's shops or mills.

King uses the skill for capturing time and place that he revealed in his first novel Faking, which was set in Regency England. He is not a florid, Can-Lit lover of words. Sentences can clunk to a close, and some of the geography in Blue Moon might surprise local map-makers and social historians. But King artfully uses a voice of detached formality, placed in the mouths of even the most unlikely characters, to evoke the sense of unfulfilled longing to transcend class constraint that is a hallmark of the steel city.

In Blue Moon, the redemption of Evelyn Dick is achieved through Elizabeth Delamere's creative enterprise. She fictionalizes the stories of women with experiences similar to her own, which is similar to what King has done with Blue Moon. King is the definitive biographer of literary figures such as Margaret Laurence and Virginia Woolfe. Though told in the first person from the protagonist's view, the book is a fictional biography of literary personalities. Together, he and Delamere suggest the relationship between creativity and criminality in repressed societies.

In the process, King provides a more logical explanation than previous accounts as to why John Dick was killed. He names some prominent consumers of the young Evelyn Dick's sexual services. He reassigns responsibility for throttling the baby. You might want to read Blue Moon to discover who shot John Dick more than fifty-four years ago, cut him up and tossed his torso over the edge of the escarpment. You may also be curious about why a community draws a significant chunk of its identity from the event.