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Rebecca McKenzie, a successful middle-aged executive living in Vancouver and recently widowed, has returned to her home town in Ontario's 'Near-North,' a place perched on the Canadian Shield, too far north to be fashionable, too far south to be either prosperous or romantically remote. Accompanied by her dog, she has come back to Hope River after an absence of many years to bury her mother, intending to get back to her Vancouver condo as quickly as she can. Indeed, some of her family seem no happier to see her than she is to be back. Her elder sister Shirley is a seething mass of resentment and simmering anger and she's passed that on to one of her daughters. Her brother Jimmy is as charming as he ever was, and Rebecca distrusts him as much as she ever did, and her elderly father, while pleased to see his daughter, is not always sure who she is. Rebecca's plan to shake the dust of Hope River from her shoes once and for all comes to naught, however, as suspicion falls on her brother for the death of a local teenage girl who had been apprenticed to him as a carpenter. As well, Rebecca has come under the spell of her mother's diaries, painstakingly kept over the years since she first arrived in Canada from England as a hopeful and painfully young woman until just before she died. Reading them, Rebecca is forced to re-evaluate her mother's life, her family relationships and her own place in the complicated and dysfunctional whole. While this is less than compelling viewed as crime fiction, as a novel about family relationships, it has much to be said for it. The excerpts from the mother's diary are touching and inspire in the reader as well as in Rebecca a new respect for those quiet war brides who came so far and found so much less than they had hoped but who persevered regardless. A firmer editorial hand could have produced a more focussed book and one that might have avoided the 'Little Timmy's in the well' moments at the climax. The jacket copy compares this first novel to Pip Granger's NOT ALL TARTS ARE APPLE, perhaps because of the post-Second World War material, but a better comparison might be made to another (and sadly underrated) novel, Carol Shields' SWANN, an Arthur Ellis award winner, which, while more technically accomplished, also uses the crime fiction genre to evoke women's lives on hardscrabble Canadian farms. An addition to the relatively brief list of Canadian mystery writers is always welcome, especially one who avoids the seemingly inevitable descriptions of endless winter and I look forward to reading Delany's next.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, January 2005
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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