In the Barren Ground by Loreth Anne White
In the Barren Ground by Loreth Anne White
What I like best about this novel was the sense White conveyed of the wide open and very dangerous wilderness in northern Canada. It’s a vivid and threatening backdrop that is critical to all the events that occur in the novel. The main character, a pregnant police officer stuck by herself with the responsibility for thousands of square miles of mostly uninhabited terrain, is also a sympathetic and likeable figure.
The crime isn’t an obvious one at first. Wolves have eaten two biologists out in the wild, but the heroine starts to notice some unusual characteristics to the kills, and more importantly, strange similarities to past deaths which lead her to question whether these were animal kills at all.
The mystery is quite a good one, although it ran a little long for the material. My biggest problem with the book is that I never really believed in the central romance. White goes to great pains in the beginning to make the destined lovers dislike each other and that worked for me. Somewhere along the way they predictably fall in love and while I accepted it as inevitable, I never really believed in it.
