“Accidents, murders, suicides, illnesses. Dying of old age was rare in Cape Dorset.”
Cape Dorset is a remote Arctic community, inhabited mainly by the Inuit and a few people who aren’t. Sergeant Elderick Cole is one of the latter. In Malcolm Kempt’s A Gift Before Dying, he’s part of the place’s undermanned, overworked police force, banished there after botching an investigation into the murder of a six-year-old boy in Northern Alberta, two thousand miles away. He’s being sued, his wife has left him, his daughter won’t speak to him, and he’s finding it hard to sleep in the endless night of the Arctic winter.
And now this: an Inuit girl found hanging from a pipe, an electrical cord around her neck. All signs point to suicide, though some small things bother him. “If you don’t think she hung herself,” Constable Veronica Aningmiuq tells him, “then you don’t know what it feels like to be a sixteen-year-old girl in Cape Dorset.”
Cole know she’s right, but still, he’d talked to this girl just a week ago. She was smart, tough, and very determined, she said, not to be like her cousin, who’d killed himself, his demons catching up with him: “I don’t wanna end up like him.” How could that girl be here, like this?
But the more Cole pokes around, the murkier everything seems to get. Exhausted, drinking, on pain meds, the girl’s death bringing up all of his own demons, he pushes forward anyway, but he has no idea what he’s getting into. A storm is gathering, one that is both natural and manmade – and maybe something else – and it is about to burst all around him.
A Gift Before Dying is a novel both haunted and haunting, a book that sweeps you along relentlessly, not only into its mysteries, but into the dark world in which they lie. Bundle up. It’s going to be a cold winter.
Malcolm Kempt comes by his setting honestly. He spent seventeen years as a criminal lawyer in the Arctic.
“I never intended to practice law after graduating from law school. However, when I came across a job posting in the Arctic, I knew I had to apply. Lacking the grades or the experience for the job, I decided to make my application stand out. I submitted my resume on brightly colored paper and included a photo of myself mountain climbing in the snow. To my complete surprise, I was selected for the job out of hundreds of applicants, which completely changed the course of my life. What was meant to be a one-year contract turned into an incredible seventeen-year odyssey.
“The Nunavut territory where I worked has one of the highest violent crime rates per capita in the world. I often spent weeks on the road, flying from town to isolated town in very small aircraft, interviewing clients and running trials. I experienced blizzards and unfathomable cold, saw polar bears and narwhals in the wild, and climbed on icebergs and glaciers. A significant portion of the population there doesn’t speak English, so I had to learn a considerable amount of Inuktitut, the Inuit language, and I frequently relied on interpreters. I was fortunate enough to travel regularly to some of the most remote areas in the Arctic, including Grise Fjord, a town with a population of fewer than 150 people, significantly further north than Barrow, Alaska. At that latitude, winter is constant darkness, and summer is perpetual daylight.
“One case stands out. A client was accused of shooting up an occupied vehicle. He denied the charges, but the evidence against him was overwhelming. The passengers and witnesses claimed to have seen him point his weapon at them and heard the gunshots. One even gave a statement that they smelled the burnt gunpowder. But right before trial, forensic analysis revealed the gun was not only inoperable, but hadn’t been fired in years. He had smashed the windows out with the butt of the gun. The victims weren’t lying; they genuinely believed they he had shot at them. This was a stark lesson for me in the fragility of human perception and the malleability of human memory. I saw this repeated in many different cases over the years. While under stress, or following trauma, our minds can easily construct vivid and convincing, but entirely false memories.”
To read more of Neil’s review and discussion with Malcolm Kempt, go here.
