The attorney’s debut novel, A Gift Before Dying, follows a disgraced police officer exiled to the Arctic who investigates the apparent suicide of a 16-year-old girl.

Your novel is set in a remote, mostly Inuit, community in the Arctic, where you spent many years. What brought you there?

I grew up on Cape Breton Island [in Nova Scotia]. I graduated from law school and had no interest in being a lawyer, but then a job opportunity came up in the Arctic, and it was a bit of a guinea pig position where they were developing a law program for Inuit students. A one-year contract turned into 17 years.

What kind of law did you practice?

I was a criminal trial lawyer, and it was mostly violent crime. The region has the highest per capita violent crime rate in North America. There’s a lot of beauty in the Arctic; it’s probably one of the most beautiful places in the world. But most of this book is based upon my lived experience, and I spent most of my time in the prison system, in the courtroom, in the houses of clients. So I had a dark picture of the place.

I was surprised by the statistic mentioned in the book that more suicides occur during the long summer daylight than the dark, relentless winter.

A lot of that comes from a serious overcrowding issue. In the winter, people need to be indoors, and if you’re in a house with nine people, you don’t get a lot of time to yourself. In the summer, people can spread out, and that leaves them alone and vulnerable.

Tell me about the inspiration for your protagonist, Eldritch Cole.

He’s kind of an amalgamation of so many men I’ve met in the north. Not just police officers: there are so many men who come up there for a year and end up staying, like I did. Sometimes it’s inertia, sometimes they’re running from something, sometimes they’re trying to save someone or accomplish something. But sometimes they just fall in love with the place. It really is one of the final frontiers on the planet.

The novel really captures both the stark beauty and mysticism of the region.

I’ve always been attracted to places where the veil is thin. You’re standing out on the ice, and you feel both connected to everything and infinitesimally small. It’s like what Freud called “the oceanic feeling.” I’m also a big fan of old-school horror like Lovecraft and Algernon Blackwood, and I wanted to inject some of that into the book.

What do you hope readers take away from this story?

I hope it will encourage them to be a bit more interested in the area, both its beauty and its struggles. I wanted to put it on the map in the literary sense, because I haven’t encountered many books set in this culture. I also want readers to get the sense that there’s hope even in the darkest of places.