The Devil’s Making

Poet, publisher, and psychologist Haldane (Emotional First Aid) makes his fiction debut with an exceptional historical set on Vancouver Island, with this winner of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for best novel. In 1868, Chad Hobbes, trained as a lawyer in England, arrives in Victoria, British Columbia, where he can find work only as a police constable. When Dr. Richard McCrory, an unorthodox American “alienist,” is brutally murdered, circumstantial evidence points to Wiladzap, the chief of a small trading band of Tsimshian Indians. After Wiladzap’s arrest, prejudices and misconceptions hinder Hobbes’s attempts to sort out the truth in a land where mores are changing rapidly and social ferment is breaking down class distinctions. Against a background of the emerging theories of Charles Darwin, to whom the constable writes for advice, Hobbes must carefully consider who are the “savages” and who are the “civilized.” A host of intriguing characters combine with Haldane’s firm grasp of the period to make this an enthralling read. (May)