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BUTTERFLY KILLS
by Brenda Chapman
Dundurn, January 2015
376 pages
$14.99
ISBN: 1459723147


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Kala Stonechild and Sgt. Jacques Rouleau, who first appeared in COLD MOURNING, here make their second appearance. Much has changed in their lives. Both have left the Ottawa police force. Rouleau has joint the Kingston force so he can be closer to his ailing father. Kala returned to her home on a First Nation in northern Ontario, but several personal disappointments have made her re-think her decision to return. She is on a somewhat aimless trip to think things over and drops into Kingston to see her old partner, who has been asking her to fill an opening on the Kingston police.

As they are visiting, a murder is reported and the pair are off to investigate. The victim is a Queens University student who works on a student help line, found savagely murdered in her apartment. It's a crime that follows close on the heels of the reported rape of Della Monroe by her husband, a man who soon will himself be killed by his wife as he violates a protection order. Then another help-line worker is beaten so badly that there are fears for her life. It is a lot of crime for normally peaceable Kingston.

In addition to the university-centred crimes and their investigation, another story gradually comes to light. A young girl from a rigidly conservative Muslim family, Dalal Shahan, is desperate to save her younger and somewhat simple-minded sister from being married off to an elderly man. Her elder sister has already fled to escape the same fate. Dalal is also seeking some measure of Canadian freedom from the strict oversight of her family, especially her elder brother.

It is a sign of the strength of Chapman's ability to construct a plot that all of these elements come together in an unforced sort of way. They are connected, but the connections are only slowly revealed and it takes some intuitive police work to make them.

On the whole, BUTTERFLY KILLS has much to recommend it, especially in regard to the two main characters, Kala Stonechild and Jacques Rouleau, both of whom are believable human beings and very far from stereotyped. But there is a real problem concerning the inclusion of the plot line involving the Muslim family. Very probably it was prompted by the shocking quadruple murder in 2009 of three teenaged sisters and their "aunt," trapped in a car and pushed into the Kingston canal to drown at the direction of their father and with the cooperation of their mother and brother. Even then, many protested calling this crime an "honour killing," rather than terming it an aggravated example of domestic violence. Chapman's handling of the story is shallow and suggests little familiarity with the culture and experience of the family she is describing. Since no other families of a similar background appear, the Shahans tend to stand as the norm. At the present moment, when Canada is witnessing an upsurge of anti-Muslim sentiment, material such as this must be approached with more nuance and greater caution.

The main theme of BUTTERFLY KILLS has to do with domestic and sexual violence, especially appropriate in view of Stonechild's own personal history and against the backdrop of the missing and murdered Aboriginal women whose fates remain unresolved. It therefore struck me as odd that the female characters, with the exception of Stonechild herself and a couple of very minor walk-ons, are uniformly an unpleasant, sometimes downright evil lot.

By the final chapter, Chapman has established the grounds for further entries in the series. Readers of crime fiction, especially Canadian ones who find local settings and concerns often hard to find in their favourite genre should be pleased to hear it.

§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, March 2015

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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