Make Believe Love by Lee Gowan (Vintage Canada) is billed as a tale of “love in the electronic age,” but the high-tech world has little to do with this story of obsession in dreary small-town Saskatchewan. Joan Swift, the town librarian, will never be the same after she meets Jason Warwick, a smarmy Toronto journalist who has been cut down to size as a reporter for the tiny Broken Head Standard. Their lives intersect with that of Darwin Godwin, a local farmer whose fame is built on stalking a Hollywood leading lady. The story gets interesting when Joan and Jason’s narratives swerve further and further apart and it becomes more difficult to tell fact from fiction. The cover seems desperate to convince us that book is trendy and cutting-edge, but the slow, dark, bleak tale is more reminiscent of the Coen brothers’ film Fargo than the glitz of the electronic age.