Melanie McGrath

The Boy in the Snow is the second book in M. J. McGrath's Edie Kiglatuk mystery series - the follow up to her very successful fiction debut novel White Heat.

Edie is a wonderfully unique protagonist. She is half Inuit, half white and makes her home on remote Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, working as a guide. She has travelled 'down south' to Alaska with Sergeant Derek Palliser to support her ex-husband/his friend Sammy in his bid to run the Iditarod. But while out on a drive, Edie stumbles across show more the body of a baby, left in the forest. Her reporting the body to the police is only the beginning of her involvement - she can't let it rest and begins to investigate on her own - with the help of Derek.

Edie is canny, intuitive, dogged, determined and just a really engaging and different character. McGrath has chosen unique settings and backgrounds as well. McGrath has written non fiction on the displacement of Canadian Inuit. Her fiction narrative carries detail and descriptions that utilize that knowledge very effectively. Customs, culture and language and the landscape all play an important role in McGrath's story.

The plotting of the mystery in The Boy in the Snow is excellent as well - corrupt politicians, age old religious sects and more. But, this is truly a character driven series - one I will be adding to my must read list.

I chose to listen to this book. Now the reader was Kate Reading - not one of my favorites as I dislike her habit of drawing out her words. (She just narrated Cornwell's The Bone Bed) But it didn't bother me as much this time - I think because I was quite engrossed in both the story and the characters. show less

M.J. McGrath's Edie Kiglatuk series ended at three books, but as far as I'm concerned it could have continued for much, much longer. The three books (White Heat and The Boy in the Snow are the first two) not only have absorbing mysteries to solve, they also give readers a vivid, fascinating picture of life in the Arctic Circle and of the Inuit culture. (Please do not call them "Eskimos" because that word means "lice" in another language.)

It's summer in the Arctic, and one of the things show more McGrath has her characters show us is how people deal (or don't) with twenty-four-hour-a-day sunlight. Camp Nanook is a summer military encampment not far from the village where Edie is teaching, and I was shocked to learn that "...thirty per cent of Arctic postings returned to the south with some kind of mental disorder." Scary stuff, right? The mystery is a good brain teaser for armchair sleuths since it involves the history of the Distant Early Warning line formed by Canada and the U.S. during the cold war. Not only are there Inuits involved in Martha Salliaq's murder, but readers also have to navigate suspicious governmental goings-on.

The investigation is hampered, as always, by the government consistently giving the Inuit the short end of the stick. Edie and Sergeant Palliser have to wait days to receive extra help such as the most basic forensics equipment, and all the while, officers in nearby Camp Nanook are working in the shadows to find out what Edie and Palliser know-- and how to prevent them from learning anything more.

The Bone Seeker benefits from an exceptionally strong cast of characters. Derek Palliser, derisively called "Lemming Police" by the locals, finds himself upping his game in light of Edie's passion for the truth even though he's hampered by insomnia. Edie's hunting skills translate well into a homicide investigation, and well, she's just a force of nature. "Only set of rules I know is mine...And I don't have any." A welcome addition to the cast is the lawyer Sonia Gutierrez from Guatemala. She has her own shadowy past, and after working for years on a lawsuit to force the government to clean up this area of Ellesmere Island, scarcely anything gets past her razor-sharp intellect and unflinching gaze. Whatever you do, don't mess with Edie and Sonia!

There's more than meets the eye to the title of this book, and when you come to that part (as I hope you will), you may find a chill running down your spine and a tear in your eye. The Bone Seeker works well as a standalone, but if you love mysteries with strong unconventional characters and learning about other cultures, I highly recommend that you read all three books in order. Then you will join me in wishing Edie Kiglatuk would appear to solve another mystery up at the Arctic Circle. show less

This is the first of the Edie Kiglatuk mysteries set in Canada’s high Arctic. Everything begins when an American hunter is killed while on a hunting expedition guided by Edie, a half-white, half-Inuit woman. Her community of Autisaq on Ellesmere Island wants to dismiss the death as an accident, but Edie is left uneasy, and when more deaths occur, she decides to investigate.

I liked the character of Edie. She is a strong-willed, intelligent woman, though she certainly has her flaws. She show more struggles with alcoholism, by her mid-twenties, having “already drunk away her hunting career and . . . [being] well on the way to drinking away her life”. The other character who is well-developed is Derek Palliser, a police officer upon whom Edie occasionally relies for help. Derek is unmotivated except by his interest in lemmings and so has to be pushed to do anything. Unfortunately, many of the other characters are mere caricatures of corrupt officials, unscrupulous whites, and greedy businessmen. The “bad guys” are extreme in their behaviour.

The book begins slowly, though the pace increases once Edie starts her investigation. Then the mysteries pile up becoming very convoluted with several villains; it is sometimes difficult to remember who did what to whom. At times the plot becomes rather farfetched. What also becomes frustrating is Edie’s frequent stumbling upon clues that inevitably take her closer to solving the several mysteries.

What impressed me most about the book is its rich detail about Inuit life and culture. I was amazed to learn that the author is British. She certainly has an understanding and appreciation for the Inuit. She details the realities of life north of the Arctic Circle: a harsh environment, poverty, alcoholism, fossil fuel exploration, and the effects of climate change. The latter is emphasized with several references to the impact of global warming on the lives of both the people and the wildlife. What will be remembered by many readers is the food: Edie eats seal-blood soup, caribou tongue, fried blubber, and fermented walrus gut. What I remember is a comment about gratitude: “Gratitude is a qalunaat [white] custom . . . Inuit were entitled to help from each other. Gratitude didn’t come into it.”

I learned not only about how to conduct an Inuit search but about another dark chapter in Canada’s history: Canada’s forced relocation, in 1953, of Inuit from their traditional home on the eastern coast of Hudson Bay to Ellesmere Island, the most northerly landmass on the planet. The author of this novel wrote a non-fiction book about this relocation. I will certainly be checking out this book entitled "The Long Exile: A Tale of Inuit Betrayal and Survival in the High Arctic."

Two other books in this series have been published: "The Boy in the Snow" and "The Bone Seeker". Though the first book has flaws, I found it of sufficient quality that I will read at least the second in the series.

Please check out my blog (http://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). show less

Solid, good writing by every metric. I found this mesmerizing for a crime novel and the scene-setting was particularly well-done. I felt like I was reading it very slowly, and although I'm sure there's room for improvement, I think my reluctance was actually just that I didn't want to see anything bad happen to these people; a credit to the characterization.