Rose's Cantina

I was noodling around my Kindle last week, looking for something good to read. The bestsellers were a bust. I'm not going anywhere Fifty Shades of Grey sequels after having nearly ralphed through the first instalment. And the Hunger Games ? Kid stuff. Besides, fiction bores me stiff. I can rarely slog through a novel, anymore -- even by authors whom I admire like John Irving. Maybe I'm getting old and the attention span is going. So I went looking at some of the Canadian non-fiction titles. I came across the Kindlet, the one by Paula Todd, about her successful search to find Karla Homolka. I do love true crime and thought this might just be a booklet for a sun-dappled backyard. So I took a sample. What a piece of crap. The first paragraph nearly made me hurl my Kindle into the dog's mouth. From the smudged window of the rattling prop plane, I see the Caribbean up close for the first time. It's exactly as advertised: emerald ovals of jungle floating in t...

I come from a town where two girls were beaten, raped, mutilated and murdered. Another girl was also brutalized but managed to escape. Once, I drove past the house of horrors and witnessed, for myself, the anger of the community written large all over the doors and windows. Die bitch. Go to hell. That's what people wrote. Eventually, the house had to be demolished. And so I'm not loving Paula Todd and her quest to find Karla Homolka. I don't want to know anything about her. Didn't need to find out she's a wife and mother. The only news I want to hear about is that she has died. Yesterday, my hometown newspaper ran a solacious news story on its front page, detailing all aspects of Karla's new life in Guadaloupe. She still feels trapped, according to Todd, a hunted woman even now, years after she got out of prison. The good people of St. Catharines rightly rose up and digitally pummeled the Standard, a newspaper where I once worked. They didn't l...