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A hallmark of noir crime fiction and film is that the protagonist is in a bad place. Then things get worse.
This certainly applies to A Gift Before Dying, the debut novel of Malcolm Kempt. Set in a remote settlement in Nunavut, a Canadian territory in the Arctic Circle, conditions are harsh, poverty is extreme and people don't believe in hope. So when moments of grace occur, they are all the more worthy of attention.
Elderick Cole was sent to the law enforcement office there after tragically messing up a high-profile murder investigation of a child. It haunts him, as do his failed marriage and estrangement from his daughter. He's out of shape, drinks too much, eats and sleeps too little. But he still takes his job seriously.
He's called to the discovery of a teenage girl's body in an abandoned house. Pitseolala is an Inuit girl he had spoken to in the past. She trusted him. He promised to protect her. That he did not hurts his soul. Everyone is ready to chalk up her death as yet one more suicide. But Cole doesn't think so. She wasn't tall enough to even reach the beam from which her body was hung.
Her younger brother, Maliktu, has been out hunting seal with their grandfather. He's safer there than in town. Burned in a fire when he was young, a fire that killed his parents, he is tormented by the other kids in town. But while out on the ice, he believes the spirit of his sister tries to entrap him when she emerges from a hole, and take him to a watery grave.
Cole and Maliktu go through their days and nights, never forgetting Pits. But they also deal with people filled with despair who don't know how to get through their empty days and never-ending nights, especially after they run out of drink. The harsh conditions of their environment are both climate and human. The people who survive best are the ones who do the best they can a little at a time.
Kempt's descriptions ring true for good cause. He was a criminal attorney in the Arctic for nearly 20 years. But his knowledge of the lows that people can reach is not the only information he learned there. There are people who don't give up. There are people with hearts that love.
As Cole closes in on a killer and Maliktu remains determined to honor his late sister, a heart that refuses to quit caring makes sacrifices that ensure there is a measure of justice. That heart also makes sure another heart has a chance to carry on.
A Gift Before Dying delivers on many counts. It is an unflinching portrait of a community living in extreme conditions, while delivering the story of a criminal investigation. The moments of grace at the end of the story feel more earned and legitimate because of what happened before.
The darkness the investigator faces with the environment and the characters, the moments of light, can serve as stand-ins for current events. Which is why dark crime fiction, especially when it is realistic about the darkness, can be cathartic in a way that other genres might not.
Nordic crime authors are particularly good at this. Arnaldur Indridason's Jar City, published in the United States in 2005, introduced readers to Icelandic Inspector Erlender. Over the course of 14 books (with a handful not yet translated into English), readers grew to know Erlender's ability to quietly listen and observe to solve cases. They also learned how his daughter, addicted to drugs, wrenched his heart.
Although what happens in the books is dark, the Erlender series does show that when decency appears, it shines a light on those it touches.
Indridason has another investigator with a new series of books. Konrad is a retired policeman who occasionally looks into cases when asked by a colleague or people connected to a murder. His series began with The Darkness Knows, which opened with the discovery of a body that has been on a glacier for years. It is the victim in a case he didn't solve decades ago while on the force.
In this series debut novel, as well as The Girl by the Bridge and The Quiet Mother, Konrad works on another cold case. It is the unsolved murder of his father, a con artist. The old man often worked with a medium to con people out of money. The medium, who died soon after the murder, believed he really could communicate with spirits.
So does the medium’s daughter, who also believes she has the gift. She and Konrad form an uneasy alliance to find out if their fathers worked together again after they allegedly stopped working together. Konrad feels drawn to solve his father's murder. Perhaps being able to do that will help him solve the rupture in his own family.
The conversations in the Konrad novels may not be lengthy, but they convey a great deal. People trade information, they let their guard down. When emotions get high, people back off and think about what was said, and what it might really mean.
Woven into all these novels by two authors is a sense of what the characters are and how they deal with where they live. The interior journeys of the leading characters are balanced by a reading journey to meet them where they are, physically and metaphorically. They offer the possibility that while things often get worse, there are moments of grace and goodness as well.
What mysteries have you read this winter? Which ones do you enjoy?
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