Stef Penney

1867, Canada: as winter tightens its grip on the isolated settlement of Dove River, a man is brutally murdered and a 17-year old boy disappears. Tracks leaving the dead man's cabin head north towards the forest and the tundra beyond. In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the township - journalists, Hudson's Bay Company men, trappers, traders - but do they want to solve the crime or exploit it?One-by-one the assembled searchers set out from Dove River, pursuing the tracks across a desolate landscape home only to wild animals, madmen and fugitives, variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for 17 years, a Native American culture, and a fortune in stolen furs before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good.In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly waves adventure, suspense, revelation and humour into a panoramic historical romance, an exhilarating thriller, a keen murder mystery and ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, one of the books of the year.

The Tenderness of Wolves

1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, an isolated settlement in Canada's Northern Territory, when a man is brutally murdered. A local woman, Mrs. Ross, stumbles upon the crime scene and sees tracks leading from the dead man's cabin north

E J Doble

This book is a multi-level murder mystery set in frontier Canada in the late 1860s, with multiple POVs and a very fitting style of prose.

First, some positives: the book captivates the 19th century Canadian wilderness absolutely perfectly. It feels real and alive and there's a great attention to detail throughout, which I found very impressive. Equally, a number of our main characters embody the kind of hardy, conflicted people one would expect from the frontier, with particular attention to Mrs Ross, Parker and Mr Moody - I thought their dynamic was fantastic. And, as another point, some of the twists at the end were very well done and rather unexpected, and the final sequence was very rewarding.

Now, for the negatives - and quite a lot of them. 
- To start with, the book is very long, slow and meandering in how it's written and how the prose is set out. I often found myself skipping over tedious parts of making tea and making fires and just... walking. 
- The book suffers from an info-dumping backstory problem, and it is a prolific one. It mired the first two parts of the book with completely irrelevant details to connect us to the characters better, which I understand in some cases, but when you get to the last 75 pages and they are still giving backstory as dense bits of text, there is a serious problem
- the book has FAR too many POVs - I think there are about 12-14 across the whole book. I got lost trying to remember characters and where they were and who they were with, and when there were no character/location/backstory indicators at the beginning of chapters it was just a chore to read. 
- the buildup to the final sequence was ruined by how unnecessary everything was before it: too many characters, clearing up too many storylines, right before the actual important characters did their thing.
- not all the characters got an ending! Some were literally just forgotten about and not mentioned again, in the last 100 pages, and I found that so demotivating and weird to read.

So overall, this book was an incredibly accurate, but incredibly muddled and flawed depiction of frontier Canada, with too many characters and too much backstory ⭐⭐

Francine Corry

Kahli Scott

Aubrey Hicks

Sara Sotlar

Kathy Rodger 

Pam Whitlock 

Karen Shimek

When her teenage son disappears in the aftermath of a brutal murder, a determined mother sets out from her snow-covered nineteenth-century settlement to find him, an effort that is hampered by vigilante groups and the harrowing forces of nature. A first novel. Winner of the 2006 Costa Book of the Year. Reprint. 100,000 first printing.

The Tenderness of Wolves

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