THE TENDERNESS OF WOLVES by Stef Penney

In Canada in the 1860s, the Hudson Bay Company rules.  The fur trade is dwindling, but the murder of fur trader Laurent Jammet near the town of Caulfield gets the Company’s attention.  They send in three men:   the surly Mackinley, the greenhorn Donald Moody, and a native-American guide.  An inscrutable teenager, Francis Ross, has gone missing around the time of the murder and becomes a prime suspect.  Then two more men appear on the scene:  Thomas Sturrock and William Parker.  Both men were acquainted with the deceased, and Sturrock knows that he had a relic that could be quite valuable.  Sturrock is well-known in Caulfield, as he was hired to search for two girls who went missing and were never found.  Soon the Company men set out on a cold, snowy trek to find Francis Ross, followed a few days later by Parker and Francis’s mother.  In fact, almost every character becomes part of an expedition at one time or another, to or from Caulfield or a Norwegian settlement or a Company outpost.  More nasty characters turn up, but everyone has a different agenda and personal reasons for getting to the bottom of the Jammet murder.  This book has it all—adventure, suspense, and multi-layered characters, especially Mrs. Ross, the first-person narrator.  She will go to any length to disprove her son’s involvement in the murder, but first she has to find him.  She has a painful history herself, and her husband does not seem to share her certainty about Francis’s innocence.  The writing style somehow reflects the bleakness of the landscape and conveys so perfectly the terror and hardship that each of these journeys entails.  I needed an antidote for the unabsorbing stuff I’ve been reading lately, and this book did the trick.