White Heat (2011) by M.J. McGrath

By Beth Jones of The Telegram

5:53AM GMT 13 Mar 2011

The cold, bleak tundra of the Canadian Arctic holds something of a fascination for Melanie McGrath. In 2006 she published a non-fiction book, The Long Exile, in which she wrote about Inuit families who, during the Cold War years, were lured to the wastes of the High Arctic by a government eager to populate these northern territories and so assert their sovereignty, and then abandoned.

In White Heat, a crime thriller written under the name MJ McGrath, she returns to the Arctic, this time to the tiny settlement of Autisaq. Here, on the “immense and uncompromising” tundra, a visiting tourist, Felix Wagner, is killed while on a shooting expedition led by the local guide Edie Kiglatuk, a half white, half Inuit former polar bear hunter. The local elders are keen to dismiss the death as an accident. Only Edie is left unsettled.

Edie is a struggling alcoholic who, by her mid-twenties had “already drunk away her hunting career and was well on the way to drinking away her life”. She spends her days watching old movies, making ear picks from bones and eating seal blood soup. But while the death of an outsider can be ignored, when someone within the community is suddenly killed, Edie takes it upon herself to find out the truth, even if it is “like hunting a fish in murky water with nothing but your hands”.

Edie is an ingenious and original creation backed up by a cast of crazy scientists, corrupt officials, placid policemen, Russian oil men and locals lost in “a fog of drink, boredom, unwanted pregnancies, low expectations and educational underachievement”.

But the most addictive character – both hero and villain of the piece – is the Arctic itself. It makes a seductive location for a thriller, a land of wonder and terror shut in darkness for months of the year, a place in which temperatures rarely rise above freezing and, in winter, regularly fall below -40ºC.

"Sadly, this review does not mention Edie's stepson, Joe, as he struggles to overcome his isolated and negative environment. Her ex-husband is a loser who only drags her down, while his brother is campaigning to be mayor and is embroiled in the worst of politics." CA