UNDETERMINED: A 1982 Northern Crime Novel

Sainte-Ursule, Northwest Territories. December 1982. The sun has not risen for two weeks and will not rise for another three.

A truck driver pulls onto the shoulder of the ice road at a quarter to six in the morning and finds what the wolves have left of a man.

Dr Adrien Vaillancourt flies in from Edmonton to spend three days confirming what everyone already knows: an old man in the wrong coat, forty below, an accident. He performs the post-mortem on a treatment room table in a nursing station, and he is ready to sign — until he looks at a single vertebra under a hand lens and finds eight parallel marks that no animal on earth could have made.

The head is gone. Both hands are gone. Nothing else is missing.

The weather clears. The aircraft comes. Vaillancourt cancels his seat.

What follows is not a hunt for a killer. In a settlement of seven hundred people, every door opens politely, every kettle goes on, and every single person says the same six words. Vaillancourt has forty-four days, a dental X-ray unit, a radiotelephone he has to book in advance, and a growing certainty that the town is not hiding what happened.

It is remembering it together.

A crime novel about the arithmetic of silence — and about what a country buries eleven kilometres down an unploughed road.