A Review of the Book "Murder, Madness, and Mayhem" by Mike Browne

Title: Murder, Madness, and Mayhem

Author: Mike Browne

Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Year: 2021

276 pages

I work at Chapter's Indigo and am given the opportunity to attend HarperCollins events where we learn about upcoming books. During one event, we were told about a true crime podcast called Dark Poutine (https://darkpoutine.com/). I decided to check it out and after only one episode, I was hooked! I am only about 55 episodes in and, at the writing of this blog, there are 217 available for listening.

From the website, Dark Poutine is "a podcast about notorious Canadian crimes, dark history, and other creepy topics as told by real-live Canadians". Created and written by Mike Browne, each episode is either in Canada or about a Canadian. Sometimes he covers bigger crimes that have nothing to do with Canada, but because he is speaking from a Canadian point of view, it counts. He calls those episodes "away games".

When I saw this book, Murder, Madness, and Mayhem, noticing that is was written by Mike Browne, I just had to read it! The book includes 25 short stories, written in the format of the podcast. A couple of the stories were from episodes done on the podcast but the rest fall outside of the parameters of Dark Poutine.

Browne split the stories into four categories: murder with weird twists, unsolved cases, murder by group, and notable disasters. All the stories were very well-written and I am continually amazed at the dark underbelly of Canada's history. One of my favorite stories was about the UFO cult who tried to ride Hale-Bopp Comet back to heaven.

If you are a lover of true crime, I strongly recommend both the book and the podcast. It made for some chilling bedtime reading and skin crawling listening on my long road trips travelling to and from church on Sundays.