I was
checking out the 2018 Edgar Awards winners and nominees and came across this
title. What really caught my attention
is the name of the protagonist, Detective Frank Yakabuski , since Yakabuski is
my surname. It is not a common name, especially with this
anglicized spelling, except in the Madawaska Valley northwest of Ottawa.
Detective
Frank Yakabuski is sent to investigate the triple murder of a secretive family
living on the Northern Divide where they built a ramshackle cabin near the
almost-deserted community of Ragged Lake.
Yakabuski sequesters the locals at the local lodge while he conducts his
investigation. He quickly comes to
suspect that a motorcycle gang with which he is familiar has moved into the
area and may have been responsible for the murders.
Readers
should be forewarned that that this is a violent story. The book begins with the gruesome murder of
three people, including a child, and by the end, the body count is well into
double digits. Both the innocent and the
guilty are killed.
The pace is
uneven. Early in the investigation, Yakabuski
finds the journal of Lucy Whiteduck, the murdered woman. From the journal, we learn about Lucy’s
childhood, her time in the big city of Springfield, and her return to the
Northern Divide. The journal is
necessary for important background information which impacts the present but
its inclusion slows down the pace. Then there
is a protracted face-off scene where things happen at a frenetic speed.
Apparently,
this is the first in a series of books featuring Det. Yakabuski. Considerable background information,
therefore, is given about the man. He is
an army veteran who served with distinction in several of the world’s trouble
spots. As a police officer, he has earned
the respect of colleagues. He is
definitely a leader who can think logically even in very tense situations. It also becomes obvious that he is willing to
bend the rules if he thinks doing so will cause the least harm.
Some of the
secondary characters emerge as interesting people since some effort was made to
portray them in some depth. The
villains, however, are stereotypes; they tend to be totally evil with no
redeeming qualities. Yakabuski thinks of
the inhabitants of Ragged Lake as “living cheek-to-jowl with true evil” and one
character even says, “’There is someone in Ragged Lake who is nothing but evil.’” And
then a villain tells Yakabuski there awaits a new sort of evil, “some new sort
of whacked-out freak. Something truly
fuckin’evil” which Yakabuski has “never seen before.” Is this the prelude to another blood-soaked
investigation?
It is the
geography of this book which is frustrating.
In an author’s note at the beginning, Corbett mentions that since this
is a work of fiction, all places are imagined and “there are no literal depictions
of any city or town on the Divide.” Springfield,
“a northern city of nearly a million people” is supposedly the creation of the author’s
imagination, yet he refers to Britannia Heights, Sandy Hill (which has the main
campus of the University of Springfield), and Buckham’s Bay, all neighbourhoods
of Ottawa. Lucy even applies for a job
in “a kids’ store in the Springfield shopping mall called Tiggy Winkles.” I’ve visited Mrs. Tiggy Winkles in the Rideau
Centre in Ottawa! I attended the
University of Ottawa in the Sandy Hill neighbourhood of Ottawa; on the eastern
edge of that neighbourhood likes Strathcona Park. Why does Corbett make it Strathconna? Why bother disguising Ottawa as
Springfield? Why mention real village
names like Cobden and then make up fake ones like Grimsly? And why change John Rudolphus Booth, lumber tycoon and railroad baron
of the Ottawa Valley, to James Rundle Bath?
The Northern
Divide is indeed “about four hundred miles” from Ottawa. (I know this because for five years I lived
in northern Ontario, not far from the Quebec border; about 25 kms away was a
watershed sign which indicates that all waters north of this point flow into
the Arctic and all waters south of this point flow into the Atlantic.) Yet Corbett chose to name his Northern Divide
town after an actual lake in the southern part of Algonquin Park?
Det. Yakabuski
is from High River, “the oldest Polish settlement in Canada . . . in the Upper
Springfield Valley.” Why not have him
come from Wilno, located in the Upper Ottawa Valley, which is the actual first
and oldest Polish settlement in Canada?
The surname Yakabuski is very common in the village of Barry’s Bay (10 kms
from Wilno), the village where I was born.
I’d be willing to bet that is where the author saw the name on his
travels between his hometown of Ottawa and Algonquin Park. In Barry’s Bay, he might even have met a
Frank Yakabuski!
Perhaps I
have an unusual perspective on this book because of my name and where I’ve
lived, but I found Corbett’s imagination to be strangely unimaginative. He is almost insulting to the reader; it is as
if Corbett expects his readers to be stupid. Two characters in the novel have a conversation
about an Englishman who claimed to be an Apache chief. The reader is not to have heard of Archibald
Belaney who called himself Grey Owl?
I was
hoping to really like this book, but I’m afraid I found it only mediocre. I am not surprised that it did not win an
Edgar Award.
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