The Boy in the Snow by M.J. McGrath

Published by Viking on November 8, 2012 

Edie Kiglatuk is an Inuit from Ellesmere Island; she thinks Anchorage is uncomfortably hot and crowded.  She’s there for the Iditarod, supporting her ex-husband’s participation in the race.  Before the race starts, however, Edie gets lost in the forest while following a spirit bear.  She encounters a couple who warn her that she is on Old Believer land while grudgingly pointing her in the direction of the road.  Making her way back to her snowmobile, Edie finds a frozen baby inside a small structure that resembles a dog house.  A cross has been marked on the baby’s body.  The police tell Edie that the small house she found is a spirit house used in Athabaskan religious ceremonies.  Soon another frozen baby is discovered in a spirit house.  The police clearly want to blame the deaths on the Old Believers, former Russians who, having separated from the official Russian Orthodox Church, cling to ancient liturgical practices.  Rumors abound that the babies were kidnapped by the Dark Believers, a Satan worshipping sect of the Old Believers that may not actually exist.  Perhaps to lay those rumors to rest, the police arrest an Old Believer who seems as likely a suspect as any.  Edie, of course, believes he’s innocent.

A second storyline concerns Alaska’s gubernatorial election.  Anchorage Mayor Chuck Hillingburg is running against a popular incumbent.  The reader knows that Hillingburg is tied to a lodge that has something to do with the deaths, but the nature of the connection remains a mystery until Edie puzzles it out.  A third storyline concerns the Old Believers’ theory that they are being framed by Tommy Schofield, a property developer who wants to acquire land that the Old Believers refuse to sell.

Edie is an annoyingly self-righteous character.  Her disagreeable personality makes it difficult to care when she finds herself in peril.  No other character offsets Edie; the others are uniformly bland.

The plot involves two different but related criminal enterprises.  One is unlikely and the other completely implausible, even by the standards of modern crime novels.  The ending is abrupt and the plots wrap up too neatly thanks to some improbably convenient revelations.

The story includes a couple of unnecessary plot summaries, in which characters explain to other characters what the reader already knows.  Perhaps M.J. McGrath thought her readers were too dim to remember the events that had already transpired, but any benefit these passages have as a memory boost is offset by their pace-deadening drag on the story.

Despite those complaints, some positive aspects of The Boy in the Snow are worth mentioning, as the novel might be of interest to readers who have an affinity for tales of the frozen tundra.  McGrath is a capable writer who paints striking images of the Alaskan wilderness.  Action scenes move quickly.  A scene that has Edie and two other characters stranded in a snow storm, fighting for survival, is so convincing I was shivering.

I like the novel’s message of religious tolerance, its condemnation of prejudice against nontraditional religions and its recognition that every religion has its fanatics.  McGrath has a sharp eye for Alaska’s politicians and those who control them, “the same bunch of old sourdoughs, bankrolling each other, glad-handing, swapping jobs, pushing their agenda and keeping anyone new out.”

The Boy in the Snow is the second novel featuring Edie Kiglatuk (I haven't read the first).  McGrath almost gets it right. I'll avoid further novels in the series, however, unless I hear that Edie has warmed up a bit, or at least developed a more interesting personality.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS