Mixing genres can be as confusing as mixing metaphors. An awkward phrase can't spoil a novel, however, but trying to write like Patricia Cornwell and Richard Russo at the same time causes an unwelcome attack of schizophrenia among your readers.

Mystery author Wolfe (he or she is truly a mystery, since the name is a pseudonym) offers at the outset a Canadian twist on the depressed, middle-aged, alcoholic police detective now so popular in crime fiction.

		"THE CALLING" By Inger Ash Wolfe Harcourt ($24)

The central cop is Hazel Micallef, 61, divorced after a long marriage, who keeps a bottle of rotgut in her office at the fictional Port Dundas police station where she is acting commander of a western Ontario district of small towns and farms.

She can't get the job full time because she's a woman in a sexist cop world. Adding to her woes is a bad back, an ex-husband with his younger wife, sour relationships with her grown children and a troublesome roommate -- her bossy, controlling mother who was once Port Dundas mayor.

There's more, from a boss unimpressed with Hazel's work to a weekly newspaper editor who has a mole inside the station.

Wolfe has created lots of reality and character to work with -- a Hazel Micallef series is planned -- but the shy author isn't content with building a world of real people and their problems.

Instead, he/she spoils the scene by introducing a serial killer fueled by religious fanaticism who emerges from the north woods with almost superhuman strength and cunning -- a fantasy figure right out of a Cornwell nightmare, meaning ludicrous and unbelievable.

He's a Dr. Kevorkian without the lust for publicity, who solicits dying victims with Internet promises of going gentle into that good night. Then he disfigures the corpses, photographs them and makes off with vials of their blood.

Never mind why. Wolfe's cooked up a bizarre, overheated motivation that gets fuzzy after a few Molsons. When Helen and a rogue French-Canadian officer with a temper best suited for a hockey rink, tamper with the killer's routine, revenge is extracted.

We now leave the mysterious mystery author and his/her imperfect hero hunkering down in western Ontario until the next monster, perhaps a Tim Horton's doughnut addict, arrives to terrorize the land.