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Glenda Toews is an award-winning Canadian memoirist writing at the intersection of true crime, psychological nonfiction, and literary storytelling. Her debut, Spinning on a Barstool, earned Gold in Memoir and Silver in Overall Nonfiction at the 2023 Reader Views Awards.
Before she was an author, she was a waitress in pub—where she befriended a man who would later be exposed as a con artist who had already defrauded dozens, including 32 police officers. When the system offered no path forward, she was given a single piece of advice: Tell your story.
She did.
Toews’ work pulls readers inside the anatomy of deception—how trust is built, how reality is bent, and how ordinary lives are unraveled by extraordinary lies. With a voice that is sharp, unflinching, and laced with dark wit, she explores not just the crime, but the psychological fallout and the cost of surviving it.
A high school dropout turned literary award-winner, Toews writes with the authority of lived experience and the tension of a thriller. When she isn’t writing, she’s pouring pints at Corky’s Pub, roasting ribeye over a fire with her husband, or walking the river paths of the Chilliwack River Valley.
SPUN is her second memoir—and the story didn’t end where it should have.
Reviewed by Mansoor Ahmed for Readers' Favorite
Spun by Glenda Toews is the true story of what happens when a con man finds his way into the life of someone who genuinely believed in him. Glenda is a bartender at Corky's Pub in British Columbia, a woman of sharp instincts and warm loyalties who meets Daryl when he washes up in town during the pandemic, stranded far from his supposed home in the Cayman Islands. Over two years, Daryl becomes her friend, her mentor, a brother figure who tells spectacular stories and makes everything feel possible. Then a single phone ping shatters it all: a Calgary Herald headline calls him a financial predator, someone who scammed thirty-two police officers and walked free. The book moves across two storylines simultaneously, Glenda's life inside Corky's and the fictionalized vignettes that follow Daryl decade by decade, piecing together how a boy becomes the kind of man who destroys the people closest to him.
Glenda Toews writes with a voice entirely her own: punchy, poetic, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny even when the subject is devastating. The prose crackles with the energy of a busy pub shift and slows only when grief demands it. I found the opening chapters particularly arresting, the image of Daryl walking back into a Calgary bar after prison and being met with a silence so complete. The dual structure of the book is bold, and it works, giving Daryl just enough depth to make the betrayal sting harder. The pace is relentless, the individuals are vivid, and the theme of trust carelessly given and coldly taken runs through every page like a crack in old wood. If you have ever wondered how good people end up scammed, Spun will answer that question with brilliant clarity.
