Book 48 of 2014: Edie Kiglatuk's Christmas by M.J. McGrath

Looking for today A to Z Challenge post? It’s here.

As I’m roughly six months behind in my book reviews, many of the books that I’m reviewing at the moment were actually read in the run up to Christmas last year. Ever since I got my Kindle it’s become a bit of a tradition to start reading free Christmas books somewhere in the region of the beginning of November to help get me in the spirit of things.

Edie Kiglatuk’s Christmas by M.J. McGrath fitted the bill quite well. It’s a short story which involves an ex-polar bear hunter trying to solve a young man’s murder in the Arctic. It also includes an extract from a longer story by the same author, called The Boy in the Snow which sees the same character discovering the dead body of a child in the snow.

It was not a long read. I was done with it in a day, which to be honest is the sort of book that I like to read in the cold winter months. I like something I can pick up and put down easily and this ticked all the boxes. That said, I would have liked a more satisfying resolution to the short story. I was expecting some sort of twist which never came; the person they thought had done it was the one who did it, and that was pretty much it.

By the same token, I did get drawn into The Boy in the Snow a lot more than the actual short story. I would be interested to read more of it at some point. It reminded me a little of the Kathy Reichs books.

I found the setting of both stories different. I can’t think of many detective stories set in a snowy wasteland. There was a real sense of place in both of them and I could picture everything so clearly. I was honestly surprised to see that the author was British because I was expecting her to come from somewhere like Alaska or Canada from the way the story was written. It’s a part of the world that I would love to visit myself at some point and I think I’ll have to look out for more books set in the same sort of place.

I’m not sure that’ll I go back and reread this story again at any point in the future, but I do know that there are other books featuring the character of Edie Kiglatuk, not just The Boy in the Snow and I am tempted to try one of those some time.