Canadian Writers Abroad

A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Cheating Death by Maxie Dara, Berkley/Penguin Random House, 2025, trade paperback.

Reviewed by Debra Martens

In the tradition of ghost stories told around Christmas time, stories told to while away the dark days, I am stepping away from literary fiction to review the second book of the S.C.Y.T.H.E. mystery series, the odd novel A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Cheating Death by Maxie Dara.
(Not to be confused with the science fiction series, Scythe, by Neal Shusterman.)
S.C.Y.T.H.E stands for Secure Collection, Yielding, and Transportation of Human Essences.

Maxie Dara moved to Edinburgh this fall. You can read about her activities in Scotland at her Instagram authorabroad. According to her publisher, Dara’s freelance journalism focused on Hamilton’s arts and culture scene for more than five years, for Hamilton Magazine, and the Beyond James blog, among others. A two-time award-winning playwright, she took home the Best of Fringe award at the 2017 Hamilton Fringe Festival for the musical comedy This Is Not a Musical: The Musical! and the 2020 Torpedo Prize for her play Alone Together, a pandemic drama. The publication of her first book, A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching a Killer, came about because Dara won Berkley’s open submission contest.

I thoroughly enjoyed her first book, A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching a Killer, which caught me off guard. That I was not expecting the grim reaper to be a middle-aged pregnant woman, Kathy, who’d recently left her rotund husband Simon, added to the book’s humour. Kathy is a collection agent, who is given a file telling her which soul or “human essence” to collect, where and when. The grim reaper has been corporatized. But, as with all bureaucracies, something goes very wrong, and the soul of the teenage boy is not there when she shows up to collect it. Why not? Because his file has been mis-assigned, and it is up to her to correct it from a natural death to murder by finding his murderer. She is aided by the dead teen, whose sardonic voice adds to the humour. He is hostile at first (“It’s not my fault you have the grace of a drunken hippo”) but during the month that it takes her to solve the mystery, they develop a caring relationship. Yes, Kathy has a life lesson from a dead teenage boy, whose “human essence” is in transition; she wants to prevent him from becoming a ghost and enable him to pass on. In doing so, she herself is in transition….

Once I got over the disappointment that the protagonist of Dara’s second novel, A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Cheating Death, is not the hilarious Kathy but rather the anxious Nora, I enjoyed the mystery. It didn’t make me laugh out loud, as the first did, perhaps because I, too, suffer from anxiety and found Nora’s constant assessment of threats to life a little too close to home. But it is a page turner. Nora is the employee who assigns the files to the collection agents, and one morning, sorting through the files, she finds her twin brother’s file, with the date, time and cause of death – on their birthday. She absconds with the file and rushes off to save Charlie’s life. In this case, her opponent is not, at first, a murderer, nor the S.C.Y.T.H.E corporation (although she will be in trouble for taking the file and leaving work), but Death itself.

Because their parents died when they were eight years old, 18 years ago, Nora is hyper alert to all the ways that one could die: for example, she prefers her windowless office for its protection from the sun’s rays (p. 1), and she throws out a birthday cupcake because the icing has Blue No. 2 dye (p. 2). She likes her job because the case files of the dead teach her ways to avoid death. Each attempt on her brother’s life – yes, a murderer does hove into view – is accompanied by a case history: struck by a vehicle, choking, car accident, stabbing, flu, murder…. Naturally, her job of protecting her brother is made all the more difficult by his own cheerful carelessness about his safety. And by the place where they end up.

Dara might be feeling the anxiety of a foreigner living abroad, but Nora’s anxiety comes to a head in Virgo Bay, Nova Scotia, the village that their father came from but never mentioned to them. Here they discover that they have relatives, all of whom seem surprisingly unfriendly and one of whom is downright murderous. Two of the relatives should be dead, and that, with her brother’s repeated avoidance of death, raises questions: are they the walking dead, are they living ghosts, what are they exactly?

The plot is twisty, almost convoluted, catching even hyper-alert Nora off guard. And her life-lesson, her development as a character, is not only reconciliation with her brother but reconciliation with death itself. Congratulations to Maxi Dara for successfully getting over the difficult hump of the second book. Looking forward to the third.

Further

• Maxie Dara will be signing and talking about her new book at The Staircase, in Hamilton: Monday, December 8, 2025 – 7pm, hosted by GritLit.
• Maxi Dara’s writing and acting credits at IMDb.
• Robert Lee Brewer interviews Maxie Dara for Writer’s Digest, (December 4, 2025).
• Jessica Rose interviews Maxi Dara for Hamilton Reads (April 20, 2025).
• Paul Semel interview.
• Maxie Dara recommends three ghost stories for the holidays for Crime Reads.
• Dara’s books at Berkley / Penguin Random House Canada.
• Scythe, by Neal Shusterman, Simon and Schuster.
• The Battle of Vigo Bay and Jules Verne.