Cozies are puzzle fantasies, set pieces where truth is narrowed to consistency within the book. Rigorous accuracy is the appeal for police-procedural buffs; that sense of being let in on the official grit. Readers of That Sleep of Death will groan at the access Sam Wiseman, part owner of an independent bookstore near Montreal’s McGill University, is given to the murder case of Professor Harold Hilliard. True he discovered the body while delivering a book order, but this slight implication should move Detective Sergeant Gaston Lemieux to keep Wiseman away from other witnesses and suspects, not invite him to the interviews.

In itself this is not a major flaw. Despite the regular contact with misfits bent upon inappropriate behaviour, cops are at base boring bureaucrats. A truly realistic police-procedural would be as exciting as watching ten hours of reality-TV cop shows, where predictable chases and repetitive jargon grind viewers down more efficiently than they do petty criminals. One remedy is to make the coppers more interesting, involving them in complex relationships or turning them into driven rogues who, one way and another, rage against the mind-numbing system. King brings in the cozy instead, developing something of a Watson/Holmes friendship between Wiseman and Lemieux. Except we get more Watson than Holmes.

The author co-founded Librarie Paragraphe Bookstore, which like Wiseman’s, is just outside the gates of McGill University in central Montreal. So there is a lot of detail about the operation of a successful independent bookstore. There is also a great deal about Wiseman’s stuttering love life, and of course a lot of Wiseman’s speculations about the murder case, including his admiration for the detective sergeant’s skills. But there isn’t much of Lemieux himself, beyond the customary procedures. Wiseman says Lemieux is an independent thinker for a cop, but other than the fact that he buys books from Wiseman’s store and lets Wiseman in on the case, there isn’t much to back that up. The flic comes off as little more than a capable Lestrade.

Most enjoyable is the look into McGill’s academic sanctum, departmental workings and backroom bitching. The brief bits of history, architecture and geography provided in Wiseman’s rambles through the campus and nearby communities will tantalize any lover of what is still Canada’s most cosmopolitan city. There’s enough potential for quirky reality here to render police procedure moot.