By Mike Levin

It is difficult to move storytelling from a youth audience to an adult one. Young  readers have illusions about life, and writers take a huge risk by disrupting them. Adults expect their preconceptions to be rattled and often find pleasure in the resulting catharsis.

Brenda Chapman. Photo by Mike Levin.

Ottawa’s Brenda Chapman has made the transition between these audiences twice in her career as a mystery writer. In a return to adult themes with In Winter’s Grip, Maja Cleary brings a car-load of illusions back to tiny Duved Cove when her father dies. By the book’s conclusion, they lie broken and scattered on the frozen Minnesota ground.

Chapman’s grown-up drama is a wild one, sending us into a blizzard of murder, suicide, abortion, domestic violence, sexual abuse and the increasingly bitter despair that comes with aging. But that doesn’t mean her story ever veers out of control.

Her narrative strength has always been the development of her characters’ personalities. In Winter’s Grip can leave you reeling but never wondering about motivations. When Maja decides to discover who murdered her dad, it’s perfectly clear that this desire has narcissistic roots. She’s the only one capable of protecting her younger brother, an obvious suspect, and it seems vital for her to show Duved Cove that she’s far more than a local beauty who ran off to become a cosmetic surgeon.

Chapman grew up in rural Northern Ontario and she captures the gentle hypocrisy of Duved Cove’s residents. Cleary’s first return since her mother’s suicide is greeted with kind words about her father, who she knows to be an abusive, disturbed, and possibly criminal, man.

As the new head of the family, Cleary feels she must take control, especially to help out her adored, but depressive, brother Jonas. In the process she collides with Jonas’ wife Clare and other local women who suffered by her father and were emotionally battered by the experience. The juxtaposition of murder mystery and family drama creates a heavy psychological veneer.

Perhaps a little too heavy, as Chapman slides occasionally back into the style of youth narrative by telling more than showing. Yet the writer’s courage stands out in dealing so intimately with the turmoil of relationships: husband/wife, parent/child, brother/sister and perpetrator/victim. The inner narrative never detracts the outer from its path.

In the early going it is easy to be turned off by Cleary’s self-absorption: how she looks, hows she’s judged and how she’s searching for something she can never have – a life with her first, and only, love. But by the time she’s decided to solve the murder, Maja stands as just about the only one in Duved Cove with integrity.

Her character grows deep enough so that when the story dives into the criminal dealings of her father and the consequent car-chase climax, Maja can’t help but undergo the (non-cosmetic-surgery) metamorphosis she’s been waiting for her whole life.

In Winter’s Grip could easily have been named Family Secrets Grow Up. Chapman isn’t kind to those in relationship nor to those who could never figure their parents out. She rarely uses ambiguity to get her points across, a remnant of writing for young readers. But without this clarity, it’s rarely possible to find catharsis.

The official book launch is scheduled for November 16, 6:30 pm., at the Library and Archives of Canada.