A 41-year-old woman named Josie takes her time one night walking home to the house on a Lake Ontario beach where she lives with her beloved husband. She’s stalling because she’s about to tell her husband, a police detective named Gabe, that she cheated on him with his handsome cop partner. When Josie reaches the house, she finds Gabe lying on the beach, dead from a shot fired out of the Glock in his hand. The cops call it suicide. Josie says it must be a murder rigged to look like suicide. Either way, she feels grief and guilt.

This is how the Burlington, Ont., writer John Lawrence Reynolds begins Beach Strip, Reynolds’s first crime novel in nine years. His earlier books, built around a Boston cop named Joe McGuire, won awards for Reynolds and a devoted audience. Now, in his return to crime fiction, Reynolds doesn’t make things easy on his writer’s chops.

One hurdle he sets for himself is to tell the story in the first person from the POV of a woman character, the beleaguered Josie. For another obstacle, he confines the book’s major action to the strip of beach where Gabe the cop perished and the widow Josie continues to live. As the story unfolds, the matter of the locale — will we never get off this dratted beach? — gives the book a mildly irritating sense of claustrophobia.

On the other hand, Reynolds blows away the potential problem of getting the female voice just right. Josie turns out to be the best thing about the book. She’s funny and irreverent even in the midst of loss and death, and she fires wisecracks as a defensive mechanism. After a few chapters in Josie’s company, the reader happily recognizes her as an Eve Arden figure with a dash of Tina Fey in Fey’s Liz Lemon persona.

Josie also emerges as sharp in the sleuthing department. Following two more suspicious deaths, she rigs a snappy finale that may not come as entirely a surprise, but caps off a nifty welcome back to crime fiction for Reynolds.