A GIFT BEFORE DYING

Bone-chilling conditions, personal torment, and scary ghosts make Canadian Arctic cop Sgt. Elderick Cole’s investigation of a teenage Inuit girl’s apparent suicide a traumatic ordeal.

For Cole, hell has frozen over in tiny Cape Dorset, a depressed Inuit town where violent crimes and drug abuse are statistically over the top. He landed there after his botched investigation of a missing 6-year-old boy in Northern Alberta made him a pariah and destroyed his marriage. The high-profile case continues to dog him in the form of a lawsuit by the child’s father. Though Pitseolala Kullu, the girl whose death he is now investigating, was found hanging, observable facts tell Cole that she could not have done herself in without help. Constable Veronica Aningmiuq, his hard-edged Inuit partner, is less concerned with finding a possible culprit than pronouncing Pitseolala’s death self-inflicted and burying her to ease her family’s grief. Dealing with panic attacks, an assortment of painful physical injuries and dark visions, Cole pushes ahead on his own. “He saw himself…as a prisoner in solitary confinement on a frozen, distant planet.” He becomes determined to find and question the girl’s vulnerable little brother, Maliktu, whose disfigurement in a fire—one in which his abusive mother died—has made him the target of bullies. With a blizzard on the way, things will get only darker and more deadly. Kempt, a former criminal lawyer, can get didactic. But with its gripping opening, exciting climax, powerful sense of place and eerie, nicely unforced mysticism, this is a strong debut. There’s never been a police protagonist more disheveled or out of sorts than Cole, which makes his determined efforts all the more winning.

A terrific, permafrosted mystery you may want to read with gloves on.