When the Dead Are Razed, by Samuel Martin

When the Dead Are Razed is a dark, action-packed thriller with an insightful eye for its characters, even when they are making terrible decisions. The main character is Teffy Byrne, a young Newfoundland journalist working for an independent newspaper. Teffy lives with her boyfriend Ger, a former drug dealer who is trying to reshape his path in life. But when Ger’s former boss gets out of jail, the past reaches out to both Teffy and Ger. Believing Ger’s life to be in danger, Teffy is soon off on the a road trip that veers from grim desperation to (very) dark humour. Her spur-of-the-moment decision to swap out a bag of smuggled heroin for the contents of a dead woman’s urn leads to a tangle of confusion, suspense, and violence.

The pace of this book was relentless, and sometimes I found myself scrambling to keep up. A lot of things happen to a lot of people, and I occasionally got lost in the action scenes – which likely says more about me as a reader than it does about Martin as a writer. This novel deals with some bleak sides of human nature, but it’s Martin’s compassion for his characters, even in their darkest moments, that forms the bright thread running through the story.