Rating: 4/5
Review:
Slightly formulaic
This is a perfectly decent thriller. I quite enjoyed it but in the end I found it followed a rather familiar formula despite the arctic setting which I had hoped would make it distinctive and more interesting.
The plot follows a pretty familiar course. Edie, an Inuit woman from the Canadian High Arctic travels to Alaska to support her ex-husband in the Iditarod race. Before she gets to the start she makes a gruesome discovery which local police fail to investigate to her satisfaction, and so...well, you can probably guess. The plot involves political corruption and ambition, untrustworthy policemen, dark secrets of sexual misdemeanour and child-abuse, our heroine coming under mortal threat and so on. It really did all feel very formulaic and wasn't really redeemed by the setting which I didn't find all that well evoked. The one exception to this was a terrific few pages toward the end where Edie and two companions are stranded and need to try to survive out on the sea-ice. Suddenly both Edie and the environment sprang to life for me and I thought it was a remarkably good passage.
I have given this four stars because it had this flash of brilliance and the rest was perfectly well-written. It's an easy read but rather disappointingly unoriginal, and I can only give it a somewhat qualified recommendation.
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