WHAT THE AURORA REMEMBERS

In Colton’s mystery novel, a small-town cop’s first murder investigation challenges her understanding of justice.

Six months after moving to Fort Gabriel, a fictional town in Canada’s Northwest Territories, Constable Nicky Ryan finds her colleague Brenda’s murdered body in the bedroom of Brenda’s 14-year-old daughter, Alison, who’s suffered a grisly knife slash to the face. As the rookie on the town’s police force, Nicky has never participated in a murder investigation before, or even seen a dead body. The narrative spans the following three months, splitting its focus between Nicky’s progress and Alison’s recovery in the larger city of Yellowknife, where she’s moved in with her aunt and befriended another outsider, a Muslim classmate named Nala. The severity of the attack prompts the Major Crimes unit to join the investigation, a development that introduces a potential love interest for Nicky in the person of exhibits officer Chantal Brasseur in addition to some frustrating hierarchical oversight. To Nicky and Alison’s horror, the teenage daughter of the victim is called as a witness in a preliminary trial against her father, Sam, even though she remembers little of the violent night. The investigation complicates Nicky’s understanding of justice, particularly as a white woman working in a tightly knit Indigenous community. (“Justice. It was a big word, an important word, an idea she believed in, an idea she had become a police officer for. So why, when Francine said it, when Sheila said it, did it sound so hollow, so meaningless?”) The novel deftly explores issues that evoke big feelings, such as homophobia, alcohol use disorder in Indigenous communities, suicidal ideation, and religious conversion. (In Yellowknife, Alison begins wearing a niqab, which covers her facial scar, and converts to Islam.) The well-paced plot, which reads more like a police procedural than a mystery, is consistently entertaining, and the characters feel like real-life people with complicated, sometimes thorny motivations.

This successful debut marks a writer to watch.