I picked this selection up at Worldcon based off a recommendation on a panel on up and coming Canadian SF&F authors. If memory serves me right, and I have been known to be wrong, Trenholm was mentored by Robert J. Sawyer of the Hominids; Humans; Hybrids trilogy. Sawyer makes a great panelist, I just can't read his books.
Defining Diana is another book in the SF detective noir genre. Superintendent Frank Steele is in charge of the SDU, the "small, elite police unit that is handed all the bizarre and baffling cases" no one else wants. His is a misfit group: Buzz Wannamaker, a Borg; Willa, recent divorcee; Cat, the units forensic expert; Ross, a demented psychopath; and Steele himself, an alcoholic who daydreams of Willa. They have too many cases and not enough time or outside respect to get them solved.
But then beautiful Diana Doe shows up dead in a locked room, having died of apparently nothing. Rather quickly after finding her the bodies start to pile up, but solving the mystery of all the bodies is rather hard to to when the Commissioner disbands the SDU.
I don't normally read detective noir, but this began as a moderately interesting read that pulled me along. The author bounces from first person POV to third person POV which if you are not paying attention to how he is doing it, can leave you momentarily perplexed. There are more cliches than I would have liked for a setting of 2043, but I think that's the point of this subgenre. *However*, my critism aside, after I picked up on a not so subtle clue, the whole tone of the book changed from interesting and shoved me right into wow, that was really cleverly done! So, it could go either way. I will probably track down his next book as it comes avaliable.
Defining Diana was a Prix Aurora Nominee in 2009 and is published by Bundoran Press, Canada.
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