Ragged Lake by Ron Corbett
Taking place in a fiction place up in the Territories in northern Canada, this book is the first in a series featuring detective Frank Yakabuski. Frank is from the north, but went away for a while and spent some time doing undercover work related to motorcycle gangs in Montreal. He's been back in the north a few years and is considered a seasoned officer.
Ragged Lake is very remote, with no roads in or out and only a weekly train service, mostly for supplies to a fishing and hunting camp located there. It was once a more bustling place, with a paper plants and a variety of other small businesses that supported the people that worked there.
When a young tree-marker working in the area checks out a cabin built from scraps, he finds murder victims and immediately heads to the resort to report it using their phone.
Frank is sent out with a couple of guys to assist with the investigation. It is winter and with the train not scheduled for a few days, he and his officers travel via the rail line by snowmobile, a trip that takes more than one day.
They find that the report is accurate and that they have a crime on their hands, but there are more questions that come to Frank. Why are these people in the cabin there? Why have the chosen this place to build a home in? Who can he trust? are some of them.
As we, alongside Frank and in a narrative that is separate and told partly through a written record, discover the connection of these people to this place and its history, the story of the indigenous people who have lived in the area,
We get a sense of Frank and his character and his past in this introduction to the series. We also get a strong sense of one of the victims here, a young indigenous woman who has had bad luck again and again despite her own strength.
This made me want to read more of this series.
No comments:
Post a Comment