Fast-pace thriller given thumbs-up

Page 13

Review

The Trickster

By Muriel Gray

488 pages, $27 (hc.)

Harper Collins

Whether a Scottish woman who lives in Glasgow is knowledgeable or sensitive enough to write a novel about a Canadian shaman denying his heritage is almost beside the point in The Trickster. Broadcaster Muriel Gray's first novel is first and foremost a thriller and as such it is a compulsive page-turner that keeps readers guessing to the end.

Set in a small ski resort town somewhere in Alberta that sounds remarkably like Jasper, the story centers around Sam Hunt, who long ago shortened his name from Hunting Wolf. Sam not only tries to forget his Indian heritage, he's sensitive to the point of paranoia to racial slurs and slights, whether real or imagined. He's even paranoid for his children, two-year-old Jess and nine-year-old Billy. Although their mother Katie is a blond, blue-eyed beauty, they both have their father's dark Indian looks.

Sam left his reserve as a young man, trying to forget his brutal alcoholic father and everything he learned at the knees of the band's shaman. He has embraced white culture in all its banality, loving pickup trucks, television shows and bland processed foods. He even loves his menial job as a snow groomer of the local ski hill. Most of all, he loves his life and his family.

But then Sam starts to have blackouts that last for hours and leave him with no memory of what happened. Often he comes to in the vicinity of one of the vicious murders that start to happen in and around Silver, inexplicable murders that leave victims horribly mutilated with no human tracks or trace of the killer anywhere near the body.

The Trickster is also a glimpse back into the past of 1907 when the railway was being blasted through the mountains. Something very old and very evil is set free when the dynamite blows a hole for a tunnel into the mountain and it immediately sets to work wreaking havoc among the railway workers and the Kinchuinick Indians, Sam's ancestors.

The book alternates between the two time periods, keeping the reader in suspense as history starts to repeat itself. But where Chief Hunting Wolf in 1907 knew his enemy and knew the only way to defeat him, Sam Hunt in the 1990s had no such advantage.

Whether the 1907 chief could win the battle was not certain, but Sam didn't even know how to fight.

While the ceremonies and rituals Sam and his ancestor shamans conduct sound a bit like something an anthropologist may have observed, they seem credible enough to someone unschooled in Cree spiritualism. Readers may even find a soundness and reliability in the old Indian ways that are lacking in modern Christianity.