The Devil's Making

Starred review from March 16, 2015
Poet, publisher, and psychologist Haldane (Emotional First Aid) makes his fiction debut with an exceptional historical set on Vancouver Island, with this winner of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for best novel. In 1868, Chad Hobbes, trained as a lawyer in England, arrives in Victoria, British Columbia, where he can find work only as a police constable. When Dr. Richard McCrory, an unorthodox American “alienist,” is brutally murdered, circumstantial evidence points to Wiladzap, the chief of a small trading band of Tsimshian Indians. After Wiladzap’s arrest, prejudices and misconceptions hinder Hobbes’s attempts to sort out the truth in a land where mores are changing rapidly and social ferment is breaking down class distinctions. Against a background of the emerging theories of Charles Darwin, to whom the constable writes for advice, Hobbes must carefully consider who are the “savages” and who are the “civilized.” A host of intriguing characters combine with Haldane’s firm grasp of the period to make this an enthralling read.

Starred review from March 1, 2015
A naive young Englishman learns much about love, life, and death when he travels to British Columbia in 1868.Chad Hobbes is an Oxford graduate at odds with his father, a vicar deeply disturbed by his son's embrace of Darwin's theories. For his part, Hobbes' feelings about women and sex are complicated by his love for his mother, who once had an affair with his father's curate. Unable to continue his education in jurisprudence without family help, he decides to travel. A letter of introduction to Chief Justice Begbie gets him a job as a constable in Victoria, whose local population is a volatile mixture of British, American, Black, Chinese, and Native American. Hobbes' first case is the murder of Dr. McCrory, a self-proclaimed alienist, who is found dead and mutilated by visiting Tsimshian Indians. The Tsimshian send a runner to tell the authorities, who arrest Wiladzap, a medicine man. Hobbes, called to investigate, doubts Wiladzap is the killer and sets out to learn more about the victim. Meanwhile, the sexually inexperienced Hobbes falls in love and lust with Wiladzap's tribeswoman Lukswaas. Hobbes' one friend from Oxford, Frederick Blundell, who's reduced to working at an ironmonger's shop in Victoria, introduces Hobbes to a widow with three attractive daughters. He finds Aemilia, the oldest, appealing but continues to meet with Lukswaas in the woods. At length, Hobbes discovers that the dead man's strange and mostly hidden medical practice involved using magnetism and sexual congress to promote cures, giving a number of people cause to hate him. As Hobbes ponders who's civilized and who's savage in a land strange to him, he must plumb his own beliefs to right a potential injustice. Haldane's first mystery, evocative and elegantly written, is a deeply philosophical look at a relatively unknown historical period.

Starred review from April 1, 2015

In this Ellis Award-winning debut, set in rugged Victoria, BC, circa 1869, a young Englishman investigates the brutal slaying of an American doctor with strange proclivities. Chad Hobbes, who studied law at Oxford and embraces the theories of Darwin, has joined the city's burgeoning police force and is confronted with the murder of Dr. Richard McCrory, an alienist who dabbled in phrenology and mesmerism. His grisly death seems to be the result of a visit gone wrong with the nearby Tsimshian Indians--their medicine man, Wiladzap, is soon arrested. Hobbes's investigation takes him from Victoria's many prostitutes to its highest social echelons and, most intriguing for readers, into the wholly foreign culture of the Tsimshian people as Hobbes struggles to understand their language, customs, and traditions. The more he learns of McCrory and his unusual, at times even sexually explicit, practices with many of the town's inhabitants, the more the young detective realizes the case doesn't just involve a white man murdered by an Indian. VERDICT Haldane never shies away from period-specific language and attitudes, which make readers feel as though they are walking the dirty streets of Victoria by his side. Historical whodunit fans will relish this exciting trip to 19th-century frontier Canada.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2015
Haldane's debut historical mystery transports readers to nineteenth-century Vancouver Island, mounding period detail atop the smells and sounds of Victoria, B.C.a booming town with a diverse population. A muddle of Native American tribes, fortune hunters, snake-oil salesmen, prostitutes, jailbirds, and drunks mixes with the nouveau riche and our narrator, antihero Chad Hobbes, in this atmospheric murder puzzle. Hobbes is a naive police detective, fresh off the boat (literally) and easily distracted by a well-turned ankle, who discovers that everyone, including himself, can be provoked or tempted into committing shameful acts. The murder is unusually gruesome, and an innocent Tsiamshian chief will hang if Chad doesn't find a viable suspect. This winner of the 2014 Arthur Ellis Award is a good match for readers who relish suspense drawn out at a leisurely pace, lavish details of Pacific Northwest Coast Indian life, and the particular edginess of unreliable narrators. Evocative of the Native AmericanBritish relationships in Eliot Pattison's Bone Rattler mysteries and Alex Grecian's dark, melancholy Walter Day series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)