Damaged is far from damaged. In fact this debut novel by a member of the Nova Scotia bar is one utterly complete, complex and convincing book that has one hooked from the first line, “Springtime in Halifax was not known for its warmth and sunshine.” True enough, and as the novel unfolds around the places so many of us know so well, there’s a sense of familiarity and identification that makes us a part of the credible conspiracy and incredibly fast action.
Kate Lange, damaged not only by being the cause of the death of her sister, her former fiancé’s accusations and by legal advice she gave to a worried grandmother wanting to adopt her son’s daughter and which may have let to the teenager’s death, is a young lawyer new to her firm, one of the city’s finest. Once you position her in a room with a view—above Lower Water Street with the partners, naturally, overlooking the harbour, the scene is set. It’s a situation far from the sordid underworld she sketches so well, one of drugs, prostitutes and a serial killer at one end, and a failed mother-cum-successful, ambitious careerdriven judge, attorneys and doctors at the other. In between, there are detectives, an ex-fiancé, bleak and guilt-ridden memories and sexual attraction.
She has lots to prove, not only to herself but to the other first-year associates to whom she is an interloper who is thought to have been hired only so one of the partners could ‘screw’ her.
All that adds to the fact that while this is a thriller, well-written and with a great plot, it is one that defies categorising. While the mystery may be medical with sophisticated and high technology required to improve lives, it’s dark and dangerously suspenseful, peopled with psychopaths and those gripped by gratuitous greed, putting Kate, able at this stage to love only her adopted dog, Alaska, in well over her head. She trusts no one, suspecting even her dog walker; the mother of one of the murdered girls; the detectives and her own senior colleagues who also want to cut her down. Callow keeps the momentum minute by minute, never allowing us to question anything.
Because it is so well-written, nothing seems far fetched; the parking garage attack, so redolent of a television crime series, is totally plausible; the unremitting tension that is Kate’s constant companion. We hold our breath when she enters the morgue to do her own detective work seeking The Body Butcher and we release it when she gets out. This time.
I can’t wait for Pamela Callow’s second novel—one of this novel’s characters, a tantalizingly yet only potential and attractive love interest, is himself up on a domestic homicide charge. His defender? Kate Lange, of course. —Shirley Gueller
