The Tenderness of Wolves

Categories: Award Winners , Mystery & Suspense , Fiction

The word “haunting” has shown up in virtually every review I’ve seen of The Tenderness of Wolves, Stef Penney’s debut historical, which won the 2006 Costa first novel award (formerly the Whitbread). 

Partly, that may be because of the book’s ending, which isn’t entirely resolved—fair warning if you like to close a book and have things wrapped up.  But mostly it’s because the book is so eerily atmospheric.  Fair warning number two:  don’t read this book in February. 

Dove River is a nineteenth-century settlement in Canada’s Northern Territory.  Despite its tenderly peaceful name, it’s a harshly isolated place dominated by the majestic, menacing subarctic winter.

Mrs. Ross, one of the settlement wives, finds the murdered body of Laurent Jammet, a Hudson Bay voyageur turned hunter.  She rouses the authorities, but then realizes she has a stake in the investigation—her seventeen-year-old son, Francis, Laurent’s friend, has disappeared and is soon a suspect in Laurent’s murder.

Mrs. Ross is not the only one with a stake to guard, however.  The naïve young Hudson Bay Company investigator; the local magistrate whose nieces also disappeared into the wilderness fifteen years before; a wandering trader who thinks Laurent may have made a valuable archaeological find; and the half-Native American trapper who is quickly locked up under suspicion—all have some interest in the crime, though not all want it solved.

Determined to prove her son’s innocence despite her own doubts, Mrs. Ross follows his trail into the frigid wastelands beyond the settlement, aided by the escaping trapper.  Their difficult journey sets into motion a chain of events that uncovers the truth.  But not everyone survives.

In prose as stark and beautiful as the winter landscape she describes, Penney transports the reader to 1867 Canada.  The novel is more than a simple mystery.  Like the fate of the girls who disappeared fifteen years before the story begins, much is only half-explained—there’s a sense of the hugely mysterious frontier dwarfing the characters and their small actions.  The characters are half-glimpsed in the same way, reserved Scots immigrants, French, Scandinavian, or Indian, whose motivations are rarely spoken and often obscure. 

There’s an artfulness to the book that will irritate some, including an odd backstory about Mrs. Ross.  But it will fascinate others, particularly when you consider that the author never visited Canada before writing the book.

It makes me want to reread another book about a winter mystery, All around Me Peaceful, by Kent Nelson, that I read more than fifteen years ago.  That one’s not a historical novel, but it’s an equally haunting and unresolved novel about a woman who disappeared in a blizzard.