Published by Random House Canada, 357 pp, hardcover

Artist Tom Thomson is so often mentioned in the same breath as the Group of Seven that it’s sometimes hard to remember he died three years before the iconic group was formed. Still, by the time of his tragic death in 1917, at the age of 39, when he had only begun to hit his stride as a painter, Thomson had already established a style and a subject matter that would be powerfully associated with Canada’s emerging sense of itself.

Award-winning Canadian journalist and writer Roy MacGregor has long been fascinated by Thomson’s story. His focus in Northern Light, as indicated by the book’s subtitle, The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thomson and the Woman Who Loved Him, is on the mystery surrounding Thomson’s (possibly violent) death on or near Canoe Lake in Ontario’s Algonquin Park, and the woman who may have been pregnant with his child at the time. MacGregor’s book is the most recent of an array of publications, plays, films, exhibitions, and TV documentaries dedicated to Thomson—his life, his art, his death, his myth—and he does a tidy job of sifting through the existing record, while adding his own theories and discoveries. He also incorporates, although to lesser effect, his personal connections to the area of Ontario in which Thomson painted, and in which Thomson’s fiancée—if that’s what she was—lived out her unhappy existence after he died.

Northern Light examines various accounts of Thomson’s demise, at first dismissed by the authorities as an accidental drowning. The book also reviews accounts of the supposed removal of Thomson’s body from the Canoe Lake cemetery where it had been hastily interred and its subsequent reburial close to the family home in Leith, near Owen Sound. MacGregor consults experts in forensic art and archeology and biological anthropology to prove where Thomson’s remains actually lie—and to re-interpret the nature of his death. He then poses a number of questions about the suppression of such knowledge, over decades, by family, friends, patrons, and government officials. Just as fascinating as MacGregor’s detective work is his examination of the social mores of early 20th-century Wasp Ontarians, who preferred silence on the subject of Thomson’s death to exposing the possibly nasty circumstances that led to it. Justice, MacGregor shows us, was not served.