In her first fiction work, McGrath brings qalunaat (white man) to the silver white cold of Canada’s great empty north, there to contrast modern greed and ambition with the ancient wisdom of the Inuit.
The setting is Ellesmere Island, Unmingmak Nuna, a far-north outpost of Canadian sovereignty. Intuit peoples were lured there decades ago by Canadian politicians fearful of America’s Greenland presence. The story follows Edie Kiglatuk, half-white but also a descendant of the great guide Welatok, who accompanied Sir James Fairfax on his arctic explorations. Edie is a guide for hunters and fishermen, a part-time schoolteacher and a fierce protector of her stepson, Joe, a settlement youngster with ambitions other than video games and alcohol. Early one spring, Edie and Joe guide two qalunaat across the ice of Jones Sound to Craig Island. There one qalunaat is shot dead. Edie and Joe believe it's murder or manslaughter, but the Council of Elders fears the loss of tourist trade. The council declares the shooting was a self-inflicted wound, a ricochet from an accidental shot. Edie, facing discrimination in a patriarchal society, goes along, but Joe is troubled. Enter Derek Palliser, a mixed-race Northern Communities police sergeant and an amateur naturalist who studies lemmings. The narrative broadens to include meteorites, iridium, missing pages from Fairfax’s diaries, Texas and Russian energy companies, NASA researchers, corruption in Edie’s village, drugs and more murders. McGrath has written a mystery, but one reminiscent of Tony Hillerman’s culture-clash novels. The language is beautiful, especially the descriptions of the Inuit people, living in “a place littered with bones, with spirits, with reminders of the past…surrounded by our stories.” Detailed in her knowledge of setting, McGrath vividly invokes the frozen land, and her portrayals of the rugged people who cherish its beauty and bounty, especially Edie and Derek, ring true.
A promising first installment in an upcoming series of arctic adventures.
Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-02248-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on...
After five adventures for Boston shamus Patrick Kenzie and his off-again lover Angela Gennaro (Prayers for Rain, 1999, etc.), Lehane tries his hand at a crossover novel that’s as dark as any of Patrick’s cases.
Even the 1975 prologue is bleak. Sean Devine and Jimmy Marcus are playing, or fighting, outside Sean’s parents’ house in the Point neighborhood of East Buckingham when a car pulls up, one of the two men inside flashes a badge, and Sean and Jimmy’s friend Dave Boyle gets bundled inside, allegedly to be driven home to his mother for a scolding but actually to get kidnapped. Though Dave escapes after a few days, he never really outlives his ordeal, and 25 years later it’s Jimmy’s turn to join him in hell when his daughter Katie is shot and beaten to death in the wilds of Pen Park, and State Trooper Sean, just returned from suspension, gets assigned to the case. Sean knows that both Dave and Jimmy have been in more than their share of trouble in the past. And he’s got an especially close eye on Jimmy, whose marriage brought him close to the aptly named Savage family and who’s done hard time for robbery. It would be just like Jimmy, Sean knows, to ignore his friend’s official efforts and go after the killer himself. But Sean would be a lot more worried if he knew what Dave’s wife Celeste knows: that hours after catching sight of Katie in the last bar she visited on the night of her death, Dave staggered home covered with somebody else’s blood. Burrowing deep into his three sorry heroes and the hundred ties that bind them unbearably close, Lehane weaves such a spellbinding tale that it’s easy to overlook the ramshackle mystery behind it all.
An undisciplined but powerfully lacerating story, by an author who knows every block of the neighborhood and every hair on his characters’ heads.Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-688-16316-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
This ran in the S.E.P. and resulted in more demands for the story in book form than ever recorded. Well, here it is and it is a honey. Imagine ten people, not knowing each other, not knowing why they were invited on a certain island house-party, not knowing their hosts. Then imagine them dead, one by one, until none remained alive, nor any clue to the murderer. Grand suspense, a unique trick, expertly handled.
Pub Date: Feb. 21, 1939
ISBN: 0062073478
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dodd, Mead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1939
SEEN & HEARD
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