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From American Way Magazine

     North of Montana is a first novel by April Smith. The title does not refer to Saskatchewan, but to a neighborhood in the city of Santa Monica - a former beach town of funky bungalows and windswept Pacific views that has now become "an overbuilt upscale enclave on the western-most edge of the Los Angeles sprawl."
     It is where Ana Grey spent the first five years of her life. Years later as an FBI agent, she returns on a pedestrian sort of errand that turns into one element in an elaborate, but plausible, plot that involves sexual politics in the FBI; an aging film star with a drug problem; the murder of an immigrant woman from El Salvador who may, or may not, be related to Ana; the buried secrets of her own past; and an increasingly complicated relationship with her male, and married, partner. The ingredients may sound improbable and too diverse, but Smith brings them into play so effortlessly that the reader does not have to suspend disbelief (as is the case with so many mysteries these days, even the best of them), which may be a way of saying that this is a mystery of a very high order, way beyond the usual genre book.
     Smith's characterizations are smooth, and the reader finds himself caring about these people rather than merely wondering when they are going to get around to either murdering someone or being killed themselves. Smith has a feel for the way people in high-stress jobs bond, fight, and blow off steam; you suspect that FBI agents are probably pretty much as she paints them. And finally, she has a keen sense of how much place matters - not just as scenery, but as a force in human behavior. When agent Grey travels to Boston, the contrast between the old Puritan city on the Atlantic and the new hedonistic one on the Pacific is perfectly rendered, and both sad and wise.
     North of Montana is a first class novel that happens to be a mystery.
Novelist Geoffrey Norman is a contributing editor for American Way.

From Kirkus Reviews

     Smith comes out swinging and never lets up in her knockout debut novel.
     It seems a misnomer to label this a detective story, since the mysteries unraveled by FBI agent Ana Grey are in another league entirely - as is Grey herself. She delves into a case involving Violeta Alvarado, a woman who may or may not have been her distant cousin. (Grey knows little about her Central American father's side of the family, and her discoveries about her past - in particular her changing view of the retired police officer grandfather who raised her- are gripping.) Alvarado has been gunned down, leaving behind two small children; almost simultaneously, aging starlet Jayne Mason, recently sprung from Betty Ford, accuses Alvarado's former employer, a physician, of addicting her to prescription drugs. Smith has her finger on the pulse of modern American life here, fictionally capturing numerous societal trends with great style. The doctor under investigation lives in a wealthy section of Santa Monica north of Montana Avenue, "the land of the newly rich where noontime joggers pass beneath scarlet-tipped coral trees on a wide grassy meridian." This is the same area where Grey lived with her grandfather during the early years of her life, and where their modest home is now for sale at $875,000. In further exploration of the breach between rich and poor, Grey is taken on a joy ride by Jayne Mason and momentarily falls under the celebrity's spell; she also goes on an outing to a botanica with the woman caring for Alvarado's children and receives mystical instructions on how to find peace. These episodes carry no whiff of sociological discourse; they just happen to be part of a terrific story. Even a plot line involving frustrated love that threads through the other narratives has impact and originality and transcends all conventions. (First printing of 125,000; Literary Guild main selection)

From Publisher's Weekly

STARRED AND BOXED REVIEW

     In a stunningly assured debut, Smith has produced a crime thriller distinguished by an unflagging pace, authoritative use of detail and an appealing heroine. In vigorous, literate prose, Smith delivers characters of depth dimension who inhabit the wildly diverse worlds of Southern California, each rendered with a cinematic eye.
     Her protagonist is Ana Grey, an ambitious, brash young FBI agent. With seven years in the L.A. field office and a recent "perfect bust" of a bank robber, Ana is ready to move up. A resentful superior stands in the way, however, and instead of getting transferred, Ana is assigned to a high-profile case involving a megawatt movie star of a certain age who has brought charges against a local doctor for addicting her to drugs. At the same time, Ana receives a phone call asking her to help the two young children of a recent street-shooting victim in Santa Monica -an immigrant from El Salvador who told friends that Ana was her cousin. Ana insists it's hoax: abandoned as an infant by her father, a migrant worker from Mexico, she was raised by her mother, now deceased, and her beloved grandfather, a retired Santa Monica cop. Then Ana learns that the Salvadoran woman worked for the physician charged in the drug case and finds herself tangled in events that lace together both personal and professional aspects of her life and trigger a troubling series of forgotten memories of her childhood. Moving through an array of settings-L.A.'s crowded Latino section El Piojilla; the blue-collar Santa Monica neighborhood of her youth; the modern elegance of the "overbuilt upscale enclave" known as "north of Montana"-Ana grapples with more death, Hollywood politics, personal betrayal and her own seething desires. Wisely leaving some ends untied, Smith resolves the central themes of this seamless narrative in this smashing story. 
200.000 first printing; Literary Guild Selection; Random House AudioBook.

From The Philadelphia Inquirer

     April Smith's first novel, North of Montana, is set not in the Canadian Rockies, as you first might expect, but in Los Angeles. Montana Avenue in Santa Monica divides the old residential streets from the expensive new hilltop manses. It is a border between social classes, and between states of mind.
     Ana Gray, an FBI agent working in Los Angeles, grew up in Santa Monica. "But north of Montana," she says, "is definitely not my turf. This is the land of the newly rich, where noon-time joggers pass beneath scarlet-tipped coral trees on a wide grassy meridian."
Ana, the granddaughter of a respected Los Angeles cop, is resourceful, fairly unconventional, tough and unsentimental in the way of the classic American detective. In the novel's dramatic opening scene, Ana, acting on a hunch, spots a robber going into a bank and apprehends him on the way out. For this she's sure she'll get her longed-for promotion.
     But because she failed to call for backup - didn't "call in a 211 in progress" - her prejudiced male boss blocks the promotion.
     Ana appeals the decision; this is, after all, 1994, and the Los Angeles office of the bureau has just come through an embarrassing lawsuit for sex discrimination, so Ana's boss' boss's and rival - offers a compromise. Ana will get her promotion, but first she has to serve a trial period on a high-profile drug case, involving a famous film star's charges that her doctor hooked her on painkillers. It's a chance for Ana to make a further name for herself - or, as she knows only too well, to fall on her face.
     Ana accepts the case without revealing an important complication. She has been getting phone calls from a Mrs. Gutierrez, a neighbor of Ana's cousin, Violeta - a cousin Ana has never heard of. Violeta was gunned down in the street in a drive-by execution, and has left two small children. Ana disclaims any connection with the dead woman, but agrees to try to reclaim for the children back wages owed Violeta by a doctor and his wife who fired her as their housekeeper. Unofficially, and without identifying herself as an FBI agent, Ana visits their big house "north of Montana." Now, that doctor turns out to be the same one accused of putting film star Jayne Mason into the Betty Ford Center.
     North of Montana is literate, well-constructed and absorbing, though maybe not quite the singular literary event its publishers are claiming. The female cop who has to buck the male establishment while battling her own personal demons, the detective who suppresses information vital to the investigation, the detective who finds the investigation mirroring her own unresolved childhood conflicts all are familiar figures in popular fiction. North of Montana doesn't copy, but neither does it surpass Thomas Harris' Silence of the Lambs and Kim Wozencraft's Rush to name just two.
     But literate, well-constructed, absorbing first novels are rare enough, and Smith adds the requisite skills of a first-rate popular novelist: an ear for dialogue and a sure, well- defined sense of characterization. Most effective here is her depiction of the star Jayne Mason, who is Elizabeth Taylor with a singing voice, a composite of Taylor, Barbara Streisand, Judy Garland and 20 other personalities. Less a personality than an apparatus, Jayne Mason represents all the pageantry, privilege and deference accorded a celebrity, and Smith's nicely detailed portrayal makes a cardboard figure (a life-size cutout of Jayne Mason figures prominently in the story) into a monstrous but plausible, even sympathetic character.
     Smith manages, too, like Richard Price in Clockers, to structure her story around the skewed, often impossible moral choices that everyday people have to make on the streets of our disorderly cities.
     "I have noticed there is always more than one truth," Ana tells Mrs. Gutierrez, who keeps insisting that the information Ana has been hearing about Violeta is "not the truth."
Mrs. Gutierrer's response to this bit of moral relativism is to spit on the sidewalk and walk away. For this is Los Angeles where what seems certain often turns out to be a bogus commodity, and what seems impossible or improbable very often turns out to be the simple truth.
David Walton is a short-story writer who lives in Pittsburgh.

From Right ReadO

     It will be difficult to put North of Montana down - it's a hard-hitting story that speeds along as fast as its protagonist runs from one situation another. Ana Grey is an ambitious FBI agent who, although thwarted for promotion by her male dominated colleagues, won't take it lying down. This uncompromising character is given a drugs case to investigate and she's soon caught up in an intriguing and nail-biting game of cat mouse - that not only puts her career on the line but her life too. - Read it.

From The San Diego Union-Tribune

FIRST-TIMER SMITH CREATES A 'BEAUTY' OF A SPIRITED HEROINE

     At the satisfying conclusion to April Smith's adrenalin powered first novel, North of Montana, set in Los Angeles, not Big Sky country, I cast my mind back to its tough-talking law enforcement heroine: Special Agent Ana Grey, FBI.
     This is a woman I could learn to love. 
     Ambitious, brash, selfish, confident, and at times annoying and foolish beyond measure, the 28-year old Grey devours "Dodger Dogs" and malted ice milks, swims a mile a day to relieve tension, hard-drives a 1970 Plymouth Barracuda convertible, packs a .357 Magnum - "Freeze, or I'll blow your head off like a ripe watermelon." - and angles unabashedly for a promotion. She cop-banters with the best of them, handles men by avoiding them "at all costs," and doesn't own a comforting cat. To cap her profile in courage and independence, Grey's only family, the beloved Poppy, a retired Santa Monica police officer who helped raise his granddaughter, is too egotistical to enjoy her success.
     But the beauty of Grey is her lack of beauty, or more precisely, Smith's refusal to describe her. Subject, not object, Grey is all too real - a seething volcano of messy insecurities, repressed memories and desires, and a whole lotta cheek. Her internal monologue, deep without being excessive or contrived, propels the narrative; that is, when the spirited dialogue or vigorous prose doesn't.
     A television writer who intimately knows her California turf, April Smith works inside-out with intense emotion and unflagging action in North of Montana.
     After she single-handedly collars a bank robber in what she boastfully calls the "perfect bust," Grey doesn't get the transfer that she expects. Her resentful ("I would call him a sociopath but he doesn't like people") Texan superior, one of many sharply drawn members of the FBI office ensemble, blocks her promotion with a bad word, and Grey ends up heading a "test" investigation into a movie star's claim that a prominent doctor got her hooked on pills. When the screen doyenne, an Elizabeth Taylor type surrounded by a slick entourage, obstructs Ana's pursuit of justice, the case begins to reek of Hollywood politics, not criminal wrongdoing.
     At the same time, Grey learns from a bad-boy ex-lover that a young Salvadoran woman slain in a drive by shooting in Santa Monica's Latino neighborhood had claimed to be her cousin. Abandoned by her Mexican father when she was an infant and orphaned at 14 when her American mother died, Grey dismisses Violeta Alvarado's claim as a hoax and callously ignores the dead immigrant's two children.
     But Alvarado turns out to have been a housekeeper to the pill doctor, a Harvard blue blood who migrated with his working-class Irish nurse/wife to Santa Monica's elite enclave north of Montana Avenue, and Agent Grey changes her pragmatic mind. She then becomes immersed in rapid-fire events that expose her personal and professional raw nerves and some well-buried truths.
     Smith lightens, but also complicates her heroine's load, with a flirtatious, and guilt-ridden, relationship. Grey's married partner Mike Donnato, who redeems the rest of the sexist FBI squad, responds to Grey's self-conscious attempts at cleverness with "endearingly painful smiles." Their pas de deux is quite appealing. Showing no compulsion to clean up the emotional mess between them, Smith leaves the pair dangling, in a most compromising position.
ANN G. SJOERDSMA is a North Carolina lawyer and writer.

From USA Today

High-speed suspense navigates every turn North of Montana.

     North of Montana is the perfect novel for that long plane ride you've been dreading - the one your company's budget-minded travel agency booked with the four-hour stopover in Des Moines.
     This baby zips along with all the jolt of a double espresso. Set in Los Angeles, it tells the story of an FBI agent, Ana Grey. This woman almost percolates with ambition, attitude and aggression, despite being 5-foot-4 with a bad habit of wearing pink high tops and mouthing off to her odious, sexually harassing white male supervisor.
     Away from the office, Grey has sworn off men after an affair with a dope smoking detective went very ugly - turns out he's the stalking kind. Grey has so little personal life that she's never bothered to make a home - she simply lives in a dreary, furnished apartment
     The job has certain satisfactions. Grey adores the work and her partner (who, alas, calls his wife Pumpkin in his endless struggle to make their marriage work). Smith conveys the sense of camaraderie within the bureau and its weird office politics as it copes with female agents.
     Certainly, Grey's FBI pal Barbara Sullivan is one of the book's more likable characters. She points out at the weekly potluck lunch that there is irrefutable proof that one of the agent's wives made his contribution:
     "The evidence is compelling," Barbara remarks in her dry way. "I've never known a man who could use Tupperware. The air-lock seal is beyond them."
     After Grey single-handedly busts a seven-time bank robber, she expects a transfer to Kidnapping and Extortion. Instead, her boss, Duane Carter, claims she showed poor judgment and attempts to block Grey's career.
     But as a female agent in the PR-conscious FBI, Grey threatens a lawsuit and suddenly Duane's superior hands Grey a big case involving a movie star fresh out of the Betty Ford Center who blames her physician for addicting her to drugs.
     Grey has a personal stake in the case. It turns out that the doctor's wife had fired a Hispanic baby sitter, Violeta Alvarado, who ended handless and very dead on Santa Monica Boulevard at 5 a.m. And there's a Mrs. Gutierrez who keeps calling the agent, claiming that Grey and Alvarado were cousins -the baby sitter's kids need help).
     Smith puts in major overtime, keeping this book in motion. She offers many pungent observations about L.A. Grey's miniscule childhood home north of Montana Avenue in Santa Monica now sells for $875,000 (hence the title). She also explains how the money and glamour of Hollywood can begin to erode the bearings of mere ordinary beings trying to get by in life.
     However, there's a big but this book. The author has had a distinguished career in TV. Among other projects, she was a producer of Cagney & Lacey. And unfortunately by the end of the novel, the propulsion forward almost overwhelm reader. North of Montana is less written than scripted from headlines, the plot elements are so calculated; the sexist boss, the drug-addicted star, Grey's own past, involving a bigoted, seemingly devoted ex-cop grandfather, the repressed memories of her father coming back. ... It's Oprah's fall lineup!
     But in fairness, as a thriller, North of Montana delivers a breathless read from the very first sentence was pure sex."