Fabulous Fiction Firsts #79

Wed, 08/08/2007 - 8:31pm by muffy

Consumption* by first time novelist Kevin Patterson, after his well-received The Water in Between: A Journey at Sea (2000), his travel memoir which critics raved as “A high-seas adventure story that combines the wry wit and deep reflection of A Walk in the Woods with the action and suspense of A Perfect Storm”, is a must-read for fans of psychological mystery.

Consumption recounts beautiful Victoria's reentry into Rankin Inlet after spending her teenage years in a TB sanitarium in Manitoba. In the intervening years this Canadian Inuit hamlet has seen great social and economic changes with the influx of southerners, bringing with them diseases, greed and psychic alienation. Victoria’s adjustment is made more difficult when she marries the ambitious diamond mine supervisor and becomes involved with a Yankee doctor.

Patterson (himself a physician) “seamlessly works murder, sex and intrigue into the mix and offers a terrific cast that makes arctic life, and the ties of kin, palpable, …and delivers a searingly visceral message about love, loss and dislocation”. For fans of Arnaldur Indriðason, Hakan Nesser, and Asa Larsson, and those who want their mystery served decidedly chilled.

*= Starred Reviews