"If you're looking for a fast-paced, funny paperback to while away an afternoon at the beach or a ferry lineup or two, you could do worse than pick up Betty Keller's latest. Better the Devil You Know is an outrageous romp of a novel set in turn-of-the-century Vancouver when Gastown was still the hub of the fast-evolving city. It was a time, if Keller is to be believed, when so-called staid Vancouver attracted a strange assortment of characters who would have made Queen Victoria feel quite faint if she had been informed about the carryings-on in her colonies. The farcical action revolves around Rev. Abercrombie Dodds, a cross-dressing con man who passes himself off as an evangelical preacher. He cons his way around North American cities and turns up in Vancouver with a five-year-old love child in tow. The unlikely pair becomes entangled with a skinny tip-thieving hooker who reigns in the red light district as the Princess of Paradise. For various nefarious reasons, both Princess and the villainous vicar are trying to evade the clutches of an avenging 'Angel,' a.

k.a. Dora, Queen of the Cathouse. While trying to make their escape they have to deal with a stinky Klondike miner angrily searching for his lost pouch full of gold nuggets; a larcenous lingerie salesman and a fiercesome female barkeep adept at defending herself with a billiard cue when necessary. Just for good measure Keller throws into this zany mix Magnolia the Magnificent, a massive black woman of ill repute; a corpse that refuses to stay dead; and a crew of sewer-line diggers who believe they have struck it rich when they discover a couple of the lost nuggets in their freshly dug ditch. Much of this story is down at sewer level with the various characters regularly tumbling into the ditch, much to the chagrin of a zealous piano teacher who lives nearby and has pleaded in vain with City Hall to order the workers to keep it covered. Amazingly, Keller is not kidding when she says that much of this tale is constructed on fact. This story is also liberally peppered with actual photos, mostly prised from the BC and City of Vancouver Archives.

Keller, a Canadian author now living in Sechelt, has obviously spent time researching this and previous works, including a biography of Pauline Johnson and On the Shady Side , a more serious study of Vancouver from 1886-1914. The sewer line really was being extended at the time the novel is set; there really was a mini goldrush caused by the discovery of dropped nuggets; there really was a scandal over a cadaver and there really was a madam named Dora Reno. However, Keller confesses candidly that she has used poetic license to play fast and loose with these historical facts. Clearly it was time for Keller, the historian, to let her literary hair down a little. So why not suspend some disbelief and join her. After all, summertime may not be over yet. War and Peace will still be waiting when you're done." -- Beth Haysom , the Times Colonist.