New to the RCMP’s Major Crimes Unit, Corporal Roxanne Calloway is keen to make her mark. She’s young and ambitious. But when she’s called from the big city to tiny Cullen Village to lead the investigation into the death of the talented but devious star of the local music scene—discovered frozen and dismembered at the local dump—she finds much to contend with. The close-knit community does not give up its secrets willingly. Barely has she begun her investigation when another very dead, very frozen body disturbs the rural peace.

In the summer Cullen Village is filled with cottagers and day-trippers who flock to the lakeshore’s tranquil beaches. But when the temperatures drop the tourists disappear and the year-round residents settle in for months of bitter cold. The local book club likes to cozy up with good food and good friends—and, of course, good books.

But not this winter.

As the wind bowls and the snow deepens, the book club—and the village—are riven by suspicion and rumour. Can there be a serial killer in their midst? As tensions mount, Corporal Calloway scrambles to make sense of an ever more perplexing set of clues—before someone kills again.

‘And We Shall Have Snow‘, is the first book in a Canadian crime series featuring Corporal Roxanne Calloway, of the RCMP Major Crimes Unit. Her first investigation is into the discovery, in the depths of winter, of a dismembered body in the town dump of a small rural town in the Interlake Region of Manitoba.

I loved that this wasn’t a conventional police procedural. It was as much about the community in which the murder was committed as it was about the RCMP Corporal investigating the crime. The book opens not with Roxanne Calloway but with a group of local residents discovering the dead body at the town dump. 

The discovery of the body in a crime novel is often the equivalent of an establishing shot to provide a place for the detective hero to start to work their magic. In this book, what was being established was the character of community theinvestigation would be taking place in. I learned of the very informal way that the dump works. I saw that everyone there knew everyone else. I watched the polite but resolutely unorganised way in which the discovery of the body was managed. I wasn’t at all surprised to find that everyone recognised the head that rolled out of the black plastic bag.

I’d expected the next chapter to be about Roxanne Calloway’s arrival and would show her imposing order on the chaos and starting to deploy her detecting skills. It wasn’t. It was about a Book Club meeting where the women who had gathered together to eat, drink and perhaps talk about a book, spent their time discussing the discovery at the dump and what it meant. 

I liked that Roxanne Calloway wasn’t the dominant character in the book. She was interesting and credible, and I’d like to read about what she does next, but she wasn’t the focus of the story. The local people, especially the local women, were at the heart of the story. 

The plot was relatively uncomplicated, and the pace of the investigation was realistically slow, which left a lot of room for developing the characters and the small town setting, both of which seemed very vivid to me. Most of the important characters were women who knew one another well. The way they interacted felt real to me. It was clear that what they knew about each other and how they felt about each other would provide the key to solving the murder. 

That all the women knew one another so well emphasised Roxanne Calloway’s status as an outsider who would have to establish her credibility. I enjoyed watching how she did that, including a spectacular scene that made her momentarily famous. 

The Manitoban winter is almost a character in the book. It was a beautiful but potentially lethal presence that demanded respect. 

The plot moved slowly, but it worked well. I didn’t guess who had done the evil deed, but when all was revealed, the identity of the culprit made perfect sense to me.

Despite the murder and dismemberment, this was not a melodramatic book. It had a very distinctive flavour, delicate without being weak, like white tea.  I liked the flavour and I’ll be reading the next book in the series, ‘Then Is Heard No More’, soon.

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