Over the Edge

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

Readers first met Chloe Yan as the middle of three half-sisters in
McClintock’s young-adult novel, The Stepfather Game (1990). In that
story, Chloe’s two major concerns were fitting in socially at her
Montreal school (a concern stemming from her mixed racial background)
and fearing that her mother would become seriously romantically
interested in Louis Levesque, a police detective. Since writing The
Stepfather Game, McClintock has essentially abandoned the
adolescent-problem-type novel for the mystery genre, in which she has
achieved much critical success, having been thrice named winner of the
Crime Writers of Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best Juvenile Mystery
Novel.

Over the Edge picks up Chloe’s life about a year later, following the
family’s move to East Hastings where Levesque is now both Chloe’s
stepfather and the community’s police chief. Just six weeks into the
first term at her new high school, Chloe, 16, reluctantly becomes
involved in what initially appears to be the suicide of an oddball
student, Peter Flosnick. When Peter’s widowed mother shares with Chloe
her conviction that Peter’s death could be neither suicidal or
accidental, Chloe begins snooping around and discovers many among the
school’s social in-crowd who had reason to want Peter dead.

In Double Cross, which chronologically follows Over the Edge by three
months, Chloe finds herself tutoring a troubled fellow student, Jonah
Shackelton, who is convinced that his father, presently serving a
25-years-to-life sentence for murdering his wife, Jonah’s mother, is
really innocent and was wrongfully convicted five years before.
Initially, Chloe becomes part of Jonah’s cause just to prove him wrong
and to bring about closure; however, information about property Mrs.
Shackelton had owned suggests that a number of other adults could have
had a motivation to kill her. Adding further tension is the fact that
the Shackeltons had owned the very house in which Chloe and her family
presently live and in which the murder had occurred.

McClintock knows the craft of mystery writing well and in Chloe she has
created a real adolescent rather than a cardboard Nancy Drew clone. The
two novels are populated with an appropriate number of suspicious
characters plus the requisite clues, including the necessary red
herrings. Of the two books, Over the Edge will likely garner the larger
audience simply because it is more grounded in the world of adolescents
and their reasons for doing harm; the crime in Double Cross is more
deeply embedded in adult motivations.

Each of the novels can stand alone as a separate read, but Double Cross
does make an overly revealing reference to the plot of Over the Edge.
The novels share a number of secondary characters, and readers will
recognize developments in Chloe’s growing relationships with them as
well as with her stepfather. Recommended.