The publisher was excited about this British debut even before it was proclaimed the U.K. Costa Book of the Year (the former Whitbread Book Award), and the excitement was not misplaced. Daringly, the author sets her work in Canada's frigid northern territory in the 19th century. As winter closes in on tiny Dove River, Mrs. Ross stumbles into the cabin of mysterious neighbor Laurent Jammet and finds him murdered. Distressingly, her son Francis, something of an outsider himself, disappears at the same time. Francis is conveniently suspected of the deed, and the Company (which runs just about everything in this neck of the woods) sends Donald Moody to investigate. New to Canada, Donald struggles to find his way among the hardened settlers. Then another man, clearly native, is spotted in Jammet's cabin, arrested and beaten, and mysteriously released. In the ensuing mayhem, no one seems to have considered Mrs. Ross's devotion and resilience-she's gone to find her son. Plot summary cannot do justice to this complex and engrossing tale of human passion and folly, highlighted by the rigors of a wilderness being systematically despoiled. The characters are distinctive, their portraits startling and incisive, and the writing is fluid and beautifully detailed. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 3/15/07.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

The frigid isolation of European immigrants living on the 19th-century Canadian frontier is the setting for British author Penney's haunting debut. Seventeen-year-old Francis Ross disappears the same day his mother discovers the scalped body of his friend, fur trader Laurent Jammet, in a neighboring cabin. The murder brings newcomers to the small settlement, from inexperienced Hudson Bay Company representative Donald Moody to elderly eccentric Thomas Sturrock, who arrives searching for a mysterious archeological fragment once in Jammet's possession. Other than Francis, no real suspects emerge until half-Indian trapper William Parker is caught searching the dead man's house. Parker escapes and joins with Francis's mother to track Francis north, a journey that produces a deep if unlikely bond between them. Only when the pair reaches a distant Scandinavian settlement do both characters and reader begin to understand Francis, who arrived there days before them. Penney's absorbing, quietly convincing narrative illuminates the characters, each a kind of outcast, through whose complex viewpoints this dense, many-layered story is told. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A trapper is found murdered in his cabin, and his death precipitates a series of journeys and pursuits. Two agents from the Hudson Bay Company come to the town of Caulfied, Ontario, to investigate the murder, and then 17-year-old Francis Ross disappears, making him a suspect. Daniel Moody, company representative, sets off after him, as does Francis' mother, known just as Mrs. Ross (who narrates portions of the novel). She travels in the company of William Parker, a half-breed with his own reasons for finding the killer. Also on the trail is the shadowy Thomas Sturrock, looking for an object he believes has great value. Set during the winter of 1867, this atmospheric, multilayered first novel is part murder mystery, part historical saga, and part meditation on civilization versus wilderness. The sparsely settled, frozen landscape is vividly evoked, and each stage of the pursuit takes the characters deeper into the wild and deeper into him-or her-self. Winner of the 2006 Costa Award (formerly the Whitbread) Book of the Year. Quinn, Mary Ellen.

IF I'd been asked to bet on who'd write the definitive crime novel about Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans, my money would have been on James Lee Burke. And that's just what he delivers in THE TIN ROOF BLOWDOWN (Simon & Schuster, $26), a hardboiled cops-and-robbers yarn that puts a human face on anonymous acts of good and evil in the chaos and horror of this natural disaster and its manmade aftermath. Harnessing all his poetic skills, Burke delivers his dispatches in torrents of sorrow and rage. Seen from this vantage, the hurricane sweeps in with fierce majesty, shredding the fragile coastline and lingering to toy with the most helpless of its victims. When it finally moves on, "the damage in New Orleans," Detective Dave Robicheaux remarks, is "of a kind we associate with apocalyptical images from the Bible." The images Burke chooses - of abandoned hospitals, "Visigoth"style vandalism and pandemonium at the Convention Center - are memorable in their own hellish ways. But the sights that really burn your eyes are grimly surreal: a dead baby hanging from the branches of a tree and "thousands of shrieking birds" circling overhead, "as though they had no place to land." And the question that stays with you is posed by an old man poking through the rubble, looking for his drowned wife: "How come nobody come for us?" James Lee Burke The scene that haunts more than one character is set in the Lower Ninth Ward, where Father Jude LeBlanc ventures into the floodwaters and disappears. When last seen, he's being attacked while climbing onto the roof of a church from a motorboat, ax in hand, trying to rescue a group of parishioners trapped in the attic. After the pummeling the state has taken, the legal system in southern Louisiana is barely functioning. Like other ablebodied police officers, Robicheaux is reassigned from his home base of New Iberia to cover crimes in New Orleans, in his case the shooting of two looters who unwittingly robbed and trashed the home of a New Orleans mobster. But Father LeBlanc, known around town as "the junkie priest," was a friend of Robicheaux's, and he makes LeBlanc's fate a priority mission as he navigates the city looking for forensic evidence - and for answers to some of the deeper mysteries of human behavior. The novel's expansive plot allows Robicheaux to grapple with the good, the bad and the morally confused, while its biblical theme gives even the worst criminals a chance to repent and make amends. And while Burke blames neither God nor nature for the ruination of New Orleans, he can't forgive the federal government for contributing to the city's vulnerability, then turning its back on the ensuing destruction. Although not in any conventional way a genre novel, Rupert Thomson's DEATH OF A MURDERER (Knopf, $23) says a great deal about the impact of evil on people who consider themselves civilized. As beautifully written as it is provocative, this psychological study places a decent man in close proximity to a malevolent force - and settles back to watch. In terms of action, nothing much happens; but by the end of this subtly disturbing story, life itself seems a lot more precious. The murderer of the title, who remains unnamed, is clearly Myra Hindley, a partner in the notorious Moors Murders that caused England to tremble for its children in the 1960s. Dead of natural causes after decades in prison, she is lying in a mortuary and her body must be guarded until its cremation. A police constable named Billy Tyler pulls the graveyard shift, and before the long night is through he'll be visited by an apparition of this monstrous killer, who dares him to acknowledge his own dark side. Billy is a good man, if not a deep thinker, and his admissions of guilt - mainly about his feelings for his dull wife and a daughter with Down syndrome, but also about old friends and a lost love - are more pathetic than damnable. Still, he shows his bravery by looking evil in the eye and acknowledging that it's not an entirely unfamiliar sight. VICTORY SQUARE (St. Martin's Minotaur, $24.95) marks the end to Olen Steinhauer's grim but fascinating police procedurals set in an unnamed Soviet-bloc nation very much like Romania. Emil Brod, the thoughtful protagonist of this wellplotted series, has grown more fatalistic since we met him as an idealistic young cop in "The Bridge of Sighs," but sliding into retirement isn't an option in the charged political climate following the breakup of the Soviet Union. Not in 1989, when revolution is in the air and the lieutenant general of the Ministry for State Security has just been murdered. While it seems contrived to force a causal relationship between Brod's first case and his last assignment as chief of the murder squad, Steinhauer doesn't dwell entirely on the past. As Brod tries to go about normal business in a police state that's about to collapse, currents of rebellion and pro-democracy fervor sizzle in the air, and this story catches all the danger and excitement of the historic moment. THE TENDERNESS OF WOLVES (Simon & Schuster, $25), a first novel that won the Costa (formerly the Whitbread) Award for Stef Penney, initially presents itself as a claustrophobic 19th-century murder mystery, set in the dead of winter and confined to Dove River, an isolated European settlement on the edge of the Canadian frontier. Or so it seems when Penney's narrator, Mrs. Ross, one of the settlement's hardy pioneers, discovers the scalped corpse of a local fur trader. But when her 17-year-old son, Francis, disappears on the same day, the novel abandons its whodunit component and expands into a more ambitious form. Once Mrs. Ross strikes out in search of her son, "The Tenderness of Wolves" becomes a wilderness adventure with heavy doses of romance and native history, handled in a graceful, almost delicate, style, but strangely devoid of the thrills you'd expect in such a savage place. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Burkes detective, Dave Robicheaux, is reassigned to New Orleans.

British filmmaker Penney sets her intriguing, well-wrought novel in a 19th-century Canadian farming community up-ended by the murder of a lone fur trapper. In the town of Dove River on the north shore of Georgian Bay, a middle-aged farmer's wife we know only as Mrs. Ross discovers the body of French trapper Laurent Jammet, scalped and with his throat cut. The leaders of the community and the all-important Hudson Bay Company men gather to make sense of the killing, which revives sore memories of teenage sisters Amy and Eve Seton, who set out on a picnic 15 years before and never returned. Mrs. Ross is particularly concerned about Jammet's murder because 17-year-old Francis, an Irish orphan she and her husband took in when he was five, has not come home from a fishing trip. Suspicion falls on the boy, who was known to frequent Jammet's cabin. Several other characters emerge with ties to the dead man, including Toronto lawyer Thomas Sturrock, who comes sniffing around for an ancient marked bone that might prove of invaluable archaeological consequence, and shady half-Indian intruder William Parker, who traded with Jammett. The first-person account of Mrs. Ross alternates with sections concerning Francis, who's being nursed by the kindly Norwegian inhabitants of Himmelvanger after collapsing with exhaustion while following the trail of Jammet's murderer. His determined mother has set out to find him; other search parties also track Francis, as well as Parker, runaways from Himmelvanger, people lost in the snow and the killer. Penney offers numerous strings to untangle, but moments of love amid the gelid wastes add some warmth to her teeming, multi-character tale. Winner of the U.K. Costa Book of the Year award for 2006, a striking debut by a writer with tremendous command of language, setting and voice. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.