The Boy Must Die

Michael Payne is head of the Research and Publications Program at the
Historic Sites and Archives Service, Alberta Community Development, and
the co-author of A Narrative History of Fort Dunvegan.

Most readers are unlikely to associate Lethbridge with satanic murders,
so Jon Redfern’s mystery immediately challenges stereotypes. His main
character, Billy Yamamoto, a retired Vancouver police officer, has
returned home to Lethbridge to garden, meditate, and come to terms with
his family history. A murder with ritual overtones draws Yamamoto back
into criminal investigation and before long the plot has thickened
considerably with thefts of priceless Aboriginal artifacts, loan
sharking, and some unsolved mysteries from the past.

Yamamoto’s task is to solve the killing of Darren Riegert, an unhappy
14-year-old from an appalling family, who is found hanging in the
basement of a large and spooky house known locally as Satan House. His
friend committed suicide in somewhat similar circumstances a few months
before, but the initial forensic evidence suggests that Darren’s death
was murder. Yamamoto’s investigation of Darren’s murder makes little
progress, but it does lead to a number of people with criminal secrets.
It turns out that satanism may be the least of the community’s
problems. Without revealing all the twists and turns of the plot, no one
and nothing are quite what they seem to be, including Darren’s
hanging.

One of the strengths of this novel is its attention to local detail and
the history of the area. Chief Mountain, Head Smashed In, Waterton, and
the University of Lethbridge all feature prominently in the book, and
the theft of Aboriginal masks reflects the discovery a few years ago of
similar material at an archeological site in the Sweetgrass Hills in
Montana. Even Billy Yamamoto is a plausible character given the long
history of Japanese-Canadian settlement in the Lethbridge area. One
quibble with the novel as a mystery, though, is that it relies more on a
fortuitous confession than on Yamamoto’s deductions to unravel its
interconnected plots.