2.5 Stars
This book
came to my attention because it won the 2017 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First
Novel. The fact that its setting is in
the Yukon also appealed to me.
Jo Silver
is a journalist who arrives in the Yukon just as winter is closing in. After losing her job at a Vancouver
newspaper, she has accepted the position of editor of the Dawson City paper. As soon as she arrives, she finds herself in
the middle of a murder investigation, and it quickly turns out not to be the
only criminal investigation in the remote northern community. Being new to the town, she doesn’t know whom
she can trust when she starts trying to get to the bottom of the deaths and
disappearances.
One of the
things constantly emphasized is that Dawson City is almost totally isolated
from the outside world in the winter: “Last chance [to leave Dawson City]
before freeze-up: when the Yukon River froze and the ferry to the west was
dry-docked. Then the Top of the World
Highway to Alaska would close, the airport would follow suit, and the Klondike
Highway – the only route out via the south – would begin to snow in.” My understanding is that the Klondike Highway
is maintained and kept open year-round, though obviously a snow storm might
make driving difficult. And in March, a
friend posted a photo from the Dawson City airport before taking a flight
south. The author also repeats several
times that Dawson City has no cellular service.
Again, my research suggests that this is not true; the town has had 4G
service since 2012. The novel is set in
2004 so perhaps the community was absolutely isolated in the winter at the
beginning of the century? Surely there
must have been some way of bringing in provisions. People with medical emergencies could not be
taken for treatment outside the town? Is
the author guilty of some exaggeration in order to heighten the suspense?
Jo is not a
convincing character. For an
investigative journalist, she certainly lacks common sense. She knows so little about Canadian geography
that she brings only rubber boots when she moves north? On her first night in town, the day before
she is to begin her new job, she gets so drunk that she has almost no memory of
what happened? She makes stupid,
thoughtless decisions; for example, how many times will she visit a site where
she is in danger of being shot? She
breaks the law in order to investigate a person’s disappearance?
Jo is also
a poor judge of character. She may be a
cheechako, a newcomer, but when choosing whether to trust someone, she ignores
all the clues pointing to that person’s trustworthiness or lack thereof. She is attracted to a man who has a reputation
as a womanizer and is a viable murder suspect?
After a few of her actions, she just becomes irritating.
The police
are portrayed as inept. Jo keeps
stumbling over bodies and so becomes a suspect when she reports them to the
police? The police seem not to
investigate a disappearance very seriously, yet arrest Jo on the flimsiest
speculation? Even the police in
Vancouver are inept: Jo feels guilty for going along with a police
request, a request that had dire consequences.
Her constant agonizing over this decision becomes annoying because it is
the police who are responsible for what happened. The focus seems to be on showing Jo to be
smarter than the police. Naturally, she also
has the ability to melt the heart of a policeman: “melted him like snow”!
There are
some colourful secondary characters, as one would expect. It is these eccentrics who often steal the
limelight. Sally, Jo’s roommate, for
instance, is a much more interesting character than Jo though some of her
behaviour isn’t just oddball, but stupid.
A seasoned Yukoner would go out in stiletto boots into the bush during a
snowstorm? And no matter how independent
and quirky the people, is it likely that a piece of outdoor art would be
erected at the beginning of winter?
The ending
is very abrupt. The motivation for the
killings seems really weak. And though
Dawson City in the winter “might as well be on another planet,” the killer has
a means of escape not previously mentioned?
Much is also left unexplained.
Certainly, I craved more information about the Cariboo/Alice story which
seems to have a connection to current events in the town.
The writer
uses some imaginative comparisons: “Her
face looked like a store receipt left in the bottom of a handbag for too long.” Unfortunately, there are too many similar
water analogies: “attempting to attribute
meaning to anything in Dawson was like trying to look at something underwater,
where the shape and size of a thing changed when you reached toward it” and “Somewhere
just below the calm surface of her subconscious, something menacing floated
yet, threatening to breach the still waters and emerge at any time” and “Jo had
the feeling of looking at something underwater, flitting just below the
surface, and not being able to make out exactly what it was.”
I so wanted
to like this book, but I found too many weaknesses in it. For me, the most memorable line is about a
young girl’s disappearance eight years earlier:
“’That happens sometimes in the North.
Especially to First Nations girls, but nobody talks about that.’”
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