Kingwell dissects the city; Hustvedt’s worriers are endearingly human

The Calling

By Inger Ash Wolfe. McClelland & Stewart, 391 pp, $32.99, hardcover

Inger Ash Wolfe’s The Calling is a riveting novel about a small-town police chief’s growing obsession with an elusive serial killer. As if this weren’t enough, it comes with a shadowy little bonus. According to the book’s publicist, Inger Ash Wolfe is the pseudonym of “a well-known and well-regarded North American literary author”. Journalists are starting to play giddy rounds of “spin the nom de plume”, speculatively pointing fingers at everyone from Jane Urquhart to Michael Redhill. So far nobody’s confessing. But if all it takes is a snappy alias to write a debut thriller with this much panache, feel free to call me Zorro.

Dabbling in the rigorous confines of the mystery story between so-called serious novels is a long tradition (a cash-strapped Gore Vidal did it under the cheeky pseudonym of Edgar Box), but it only takes a few pages to reveal that Wolfe has too much respect for the suspense genre to regard The Calling as literary slumming. This is a psychological thriller that delivers all the required chills with a style that’s as lean as it is graceful. (Want an example on the wry side? A small-town official asks what Toronto police call two murders in a row. Answer? “The morning shift.”) While Wolfe doesn’t shy away from describing gruesome murder scenes, she crafts virtually every sentence with a keen and knowing sense of purpose.

Fans of everything from vintage Minette Walters to the Prime Suspect TV series will recognize the basic template for the plot. A tough but sensitive police officer gets hopelessly drawn into the web of a twisted serial killer. In this case, the cop is Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef of Port Dundas, Ontario. A 61-year-old with looming alcohol problems and a bad back, Hazel refers to Port Dundas as her “true life partner”, a place “where every doorway tells a story”. At first, the homegrown cop seems like no match for Simon Mallick, a brilliant psychopath who uses his knowledge of botanically based poisons to kill the terminally ill.

Mallick has a strangely gentle side, which is how he manages to lull his victims into a false sense of well-being. But when Hazel gets a look at the creepy way Simon mutilates his dead victims, she revs up her mental game to try to keep up.

It would spoil things to reveal much more. But it’s fair to say that The Calling is one of the best examinations of how murder affects a sleepy little town since L. R. Wright’s The Suspect. In many ways, Hazel’s abiding love for Port Dundas tells us everything we need to know about the author. Unmasked or incognito, Wolfe really cares.