It’s my pleasure to introduce you to Winona Kent and her latest novel Bad Boy, Book 5 in her Jason Davey Mystery Series. Winona is the current national Chair of the Crime Writers of Canada and an active member of Sisters in Crime-Canada West. Winona describes Bad Boy as “well-scrambled” as, generically, it falls somewhere between a softboiled and hardboiled mystery, and is served with an added dash of noir.

BAD BOY

Fresh from a thirty-four-day, eighteen-city tour of England, professional musician and amateur sleuth Jason Davey accepts an invitation from a fan, Marcus Merritt, to meet at Level 72 of The Shard, in London, to sign one of his band’s programs. Marcus hands him the booklet, then leaps to his death from the open viewing platform. Thus begins a week-long quest, during which Jason is tasked with retrieving a stolen collection of scores by England’s most famous composer, Sir Edward Elgar.

Marcus shared Elgar’s love of eccentric puzzles and games, and the challenging clues he’s assembled for Jason seem to mirror the fourteen themes in Elgar’s renowned Enigma Variations. Jason’s journey takes him to Derbyshire and then back to London, and a four-hour walking tour of Soho’s lost music venues where, in Denmark Street, he faces a life-threatening battle with two adversaries: a treacherous Russian gangster who is also hunting for the stolen collection, and Marcus’s sister–who holds the key to a decades-old mystery involving a notorious London crime lord’s missing daughter.

About Winona Kent: Winona is an award-winning author who was born in London, England and grew up in Regina, Saskatchewan, where she completed her BA in English at the University of Regina. After moving to Vancouver, she graduated from UBC with an MFA in Creative Writing, and a diploma in Writing for Screen and TV from Vancouver Film School. Winona’s writing breakthrough came many years ago when she won First Prize in the Flare Magazine Fiction Contest with her short story about an all-night radio newsman, “Tower of Power.” Her debut novel Skywatcher was a finalist in the Seal Books First Novel Award and was published by Bantam Books in 1989. This was followed by a sequel, The Cilla Rose Affair, and her first mystery, Cold Play, set aboard a cruise ship in Alaska.

After three time-travel romances (Persistence of Memory, In Loving Memory and Marianne’s Memory), Winona returned to mysteries with Disturbing the Peace, a novella, in 2017 and the novel Notes on a Missing G-String in 2019, both featuring the character she first introduced in Cold Play, professional jazz musician / amateur sleuth Jason Davey. The third and fourth books in Winona’s Jason Davey Mystery series, Lost Time and Ticket to Ride, were published in 2020 and 2022.

Winona also writes short fiction. Her story “Salty Dog Blues” appeared in Sisters in Crime-Canada West’s anthology Crime Wave in October 2020 and was nominated as a finalist in Crime Writers of Canada’s Awards of Excellence for Best Crime Novella in April 2021. “Blue Devil Blues” was one of the four entries in the anthology Last Shot, published in June 2021, and “Terminal Lucidity” appeared in the Sisters in Crime-Canada West anthology, Women of a Certain Age (October 2022). “On the Internet, Nobody Knows You’re a Dog”, will appear in the upcoming Sisters in Crime-Canada West anthology, Dangerous Games (October 2024). A collection of Winona’s short stories, Ten Stories That Worried My Mother, was published in 2023.

Winona has been a temporary secretary, a travel agent , a screenwriter and the Managing Editor of a literary magazine. After many decades working in jobs completely unrelated to writing, Winona is now happily embracing life as a full-time author. She lives in New Westminster, BC with her husband, and a concerning number of disobedient houseplants, many of which were rescued from her apartment building’s compost bin after being abandoned by previous owners. Find her at winonakent.com

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