Lost Girls

Sarah Robertson is editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

This first novel by Andrew Pyper, a nonpractising lawyer and author of
the short-story collection Kiss Me (1996), opens with an arresting
prologue that the plodding main story fails to live up to. A teenage boy
and his cousin are canoeing on a lake at dusk. The boy’s amorous
gropings and the girl’s panicked reaction cause the canoe to tip over,
plunging them both into the icy water. The boy’s frantic efforts at
rescue fail. He watches in horror as his cousin is “pulled down from
the last snaking shafts of sunlight into the black, into the blind, cold
depths.”

The main story, set in Murdoch, a Northern Ontario town that has seen
better days, revolves around another tragedy: the disappearance, and
presumed murder, of two teenage girls. The prime suspect is their
English teacher), Thomas Tripp. Railroaded by his two partners into
taking on Tripp’s defence is 33-year-old Batholomew Crane, an amoral,
self-satisfied, coke-snorting criminal defence lawyer who takes pride in
his firm’s nickname, Lie, Get ’Em Off & Associate. Crane, a
“long-resigned bachelor and afficionado [sic] of the seedy,” checks
into the town’s shabby Empire Hotel and proceeds to build a defence,
in part by stealing incriminating evidence.

In the course of his investigations, Crane tangles with various locals,
including his eccentric and uncooperative client, the “startlingly
fat” Crown attorney, and the father of one of the missing girls.
Casting a shadow over the present-day case is the story of the Lady of
the Lake, a local legend inspired by the drowning death of a madwoman 50
years earlier. The novel’s twist ending turns not on this local myth,
but rather on the revealed connection between the prologue and the main
story.

Described as an “audacious, literary thriller” in the jacket copy,
Lost Girls combines the elements of murder mystery, ghost story, and
courtroom drama. Unfortunately, these elements do not add up to a
satisfying whole. The suspense and sense of dread that make the prologue
so gripping are, in the main story, undermined by slack pacing and a
meandering plot. Nor do the novel’s various elements succeed on their
own terms. As a murder mystery, the Tripp case is a nonstarter. The
novel’s intermittent ghostly sightings are more hoary than chilling.
Finally, the legal drama is mired in post-O.J. angst about, and
revulsion toward, the defence side of the criminal justice equation. We
are clearly meant to applaud Crane’s abandonment of his client at the
end of the novel. In fact, his actions represent a blatant dereliction
of professional duty. Far from making the leap from rogue lawyer to
ennobled defender of the truth, our hero merely trades in one form of
malpractice for another.