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Readers who have enjoyed Barbara Fradkin's series featuring Inspector Green of the Ottawa police will not be disappointed with her new protagonist, Amanda Doucette. This 35 year old former aid worker is back in Canada having survived the gruesome trauma of the civil war in Nigeria. She is suffering from PTSD and attempting to find a new purpose in life. A fellow survivor, now living in Newfoundland, invites Amanda to go wilderness camping with him to "heal their broken souls." His invitation urged her to "just get yourself here and I will find us the perfect getaway." When Amanda arrives by ferry on her motorbike with a sidecar to accommodate her trusty companion, a Nova Scotian Duck Tolling Retriever, Phil is nowhere to be found. Amada learns from Phil's wife that he left to go camping two days ago, taking his ten-year-old son Tyler with him.
Life with Phil has not been easy for Sheri. He has been seriously damaged by the Nigerian experience, unable to hold down a job, withdrawn and emotionally alienated from his wife and son. The marriage is breaking up. The original plan for the camping trip has morphed into a way to reconnect with his son. When Amanda and Sheri find that Phil has deliberately left behind his cell phone, Amanda convinces Sheri that it is time to inform the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who act as the provincial police for Newfoundland.
The situation becomes even more complicated because Sheri's new friend is Corporal Maloney of the Grand Falls RCMP. He advises that because of Phil's fragility, they keep the search low key to begin with and contact a close friend of Phil's, another RCMP officer, Chris Tymko, to see if he has information about where Phil was planning to take Tyler. Amanda, who is a trained first-aid and crisis responder, decides to join forces with Corporal Tymko in searching the villages and questioning local people along their way north. They quickly discover that Phil has been trying to rent a boat to take Tyler fishing and to see icebergs. Local fishermen were reluctant to rent him their boats as he was an inexperienced ocean sailor. He eventually sets off to find a boat used by an old recluse up the back harbor from Conche. When the hermit is found dead, Phil is the major suspect.
An imortant subplot emerges when a body is discovered in a commercial fisherman's catch. By the dead man's clothing, the RCMP surmise that he may be connected to a group of strangers spotted offshore in a life boat. They too were unsuitably dressed for the cold and rough weather of the north Atlantic. All the RCMP resources become tied up in searching for the lifeboat as they speculate that its occupants are illegal immigrants.
Alarmed by the all-point police bulletin posted on Phil, Amanda is too anxious to wait for Tymko to search the coastline near Conche for the hermit's boat. She convinces a local fisherman to lend her his boat and just as she is about to give up, she spies a wreck sloshing about on the shore some distance north of Conche. The story gathers momentum from this point on and Kaylee, Amanda's dog, proves critical to her survival.
Fradkin promises to set each book in this new series in a different Canadian province. Having travelled though some of the same landscape as the setting for the action in FIRE IN THE STARS, I would say that the appeal of this story is its evocation of rural Newfoundland and its people. Fradkin successfully uses characteristic Newfoundland idiom while referencing local issues and practices. She even manages to mention the prevalence of moose and the importance of the moose hunting season to the islanders.
The suspense and tension created by the interaction between the two searches echoes an earlier Fradkin book involving a wilderness search, THE WHISPER OF LEGENDS where we first met Chris Tymko, then a Constable stationed at Fort Simpson near the Nahanni National Park. It will be intriguing to see if Fradkin will continue to use Chris Tymko in this new series of the adventures of Amanda Doucette.
§ Ann Pearson is a photographer and retired college Humanities teacher who lives in Montreal
Reviewed by Ann Pearson, September 2016
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