Review: The Whisper of Legends by Barbara Fradkin

 This ninth book of the series drags Inspector Green far outside his comfort zone. 

When his daughter Hannah hits the whitewater on the breathtakingly beautiful and dangerously isolated Nahanni River, vague parental worries soon solidify into well-founded concern, for Green if not for the wilderness area’s more trekker-hardened RCMP.

 Disturbing facts come to light about the expedition’s leader. A freak storm washes one of the group’s canoes downstream. Mining consortiums war with environmentalists. Soon Green and Sullivan are on their way to the Yukon, hoping to find Hannah before the rising tensions rend her group and leave her stranded in a trackless, perilous wilderness. Desk-bound Green forces himself past physical and psychological weaknesses in an unfamiliar and hostile environment, where grizzlies and wolves are no longer the most dangerous predators.

 

Part family saga, part a thoughtful exploration of the growing conflict between environmental and resource-extraction priorities, “Whisper of Legends” is an adrenaline-fueled adventure, nearly impossible to put down.

The Whisper of Legends

Barbara Fradkin

Dundurn 2013

Review: The Slickrock Paradox

by Stephen Legault

Opening line: She was not there.

The first paragraph of this claustrophobic, taut tale takes us, paradoxically, to the wide-open Utah desert, where Silas Pearson is searching for a missing woman. He knows his quest is likely hopeless. This expanse of red sandstone may look flat but it is creased with crevices, some of them hundreds of feet deep. An unwary hiker might break an ankle stumbling across a narrow rift and die of heat exhaustion under the sun, or fall into black depths and drown as the next rainstorm funnels through the gully. Yet Silas keeps looking, obsessively mapping the terrain a few days each week, marking off his search areas in 7.5 inch grid squares on the small-scale topographical maps that paper his living room walls. He has done this, we learn, for the past three-plus years, seeking his wife.

By the end of Chapter One, I shared Silas’ obsession, drawn in by his close observation of the rock itself, by his attention to every nuance of weather and geography that might offer a clue to her end. My desire to learn his wife’s fate, and to understand the web of emotions that drove his obsessive hunt, carried my eyes from sentence to sentence, page to page, while the sere landscape built itself in my mind.

The Slickrock Paradox takes us through terrain as unforgiving on the outside as Silas’ inner country is to him. This is a novel for those who love wilderness as passionately as they do a gripping, suspenseful mystery.

The Slickrock Paradox(2012)

#1 in The Red Rock Canyon Mysteries

By Stephen Legault

Touchwood Editions