Product Description

Highly charged and profoundly important, Incidents in the Life of Markus Paulis a new masterpiece from one of Canadas greatest writers.

On a bright morning in June 1985, a young Micmac man starts his first day of workbut by noon he is dead, killed mysteriously in the fourth hold of the cargo ship . Hector Penniac had been planning to go to university, perhaps to study medicine. Roger Savage, a loner who has had to make his own way since his youth, comes under suspicion of killing Hector over a union card and a mornings work. Even if he cant quite put it into words, Roger immediately sees the ways in which Hectors death will be viewed as symbolic, as more than an isolated tragedyand that he is caught in a chain of events that will become more explosive with each passing day.

The aging chief of Hectors band, Amos Paul, tries to reduce the tensions raised by the investigation into Hectors death and its connection to a host of other simmering issues, from territorial lines to fishing rights. His approach leads him into conflict with Isaac Snow, a younger and more dynamic man whom many in the band would prefer to lead themespecially when the case attracts press attention in the form of an ambitious journalist named Max Doran, the first of many outsiders to bring his own agenda and motives onto the Micmac reserve. Joel Ginnish, Isaacs volatile and sometimes violent friend, decides to bring justice to Roger Savage when the authorities refuse to, blockading the reserve in order to do so. And though perhaps no one really means for it to happen, soon a single incident grows ineluctably into a crisis that engulfs a whole society, a whole province and in some ways a whole country.

Twenty years later, RCMP officer Markus PaulChief Amos Pauls grandson, who was fifteen years old when Hector was killedtries to piece together the clues surrounding Hector Penniacs death. The decades have passed, and much about the case has been twisted beyond recognition by the many ways that different people have sought to exploit it. But, haunted by the past, Markus still struggles towards a truth that will snap those chains that had once seemed impossible to break. (290)

This is a novel that begins with an instant from todays headlines, and digs down into the marrow to explore the oldest themes we know: murder and betrayal, race and history, the brutal and chaotic forces that guide the groups we are drawn into. Nothing is one-sided in David Adams Richards worldeven the most scheming characters have moments of grace, while the most benevolent are shown to have selfish motives, or the need to show off their goodness. All are depicted with an almost Biblical gravity, framed by an understated genius of storytelling that makes this novel at once both an utterly gripping mystery, and a vitally important document of Canadas broken past and divided present.