The Dead of Winter

Sarah Robertson is the editor of the Canadian Book Review Annual.

Lisa Appignanesi has written or edited 10 works of nonfiction (including
Freud’s Women and Simon de Beauvoir) and is the author of four
bestselling novels. Part literary whodunit and part psychological study,
The Dead of Winter is narrated by Pierre Rousseau, a small-town notary
and disaffected Quebec nationalist. The main action takes place in
Ste-Anne, with interludes in Montreal and Paris.

As the novel opens, the solitary Pierre (a self-described “keeper and
recorder of [Ste-Anne’s] secrets”) is preoccupied with thoughts of
Madeleine, a world-famous actress he has known since childhood. Still
reeling from the recent massacre of 14 women students at the Ecole
Polytechnique, Madeleine is obliged to fulfil her commitment to star in
Hedda Gabler. The production is a critical and box-office flop, so when
Madeleine’s body is found hanging in her grandmother’s barn, it is
assumed that, like the doomed Hedda, she committed suicide. Desperate to
find answers, a devastated Pierre participates in what will eventually
be designated a murder investigation. Alternating with the present-day
investigation are flashbacks that paint a disturbing portrait of someone
close to Madeleine.

Readers who carefully scrutinize the expansive, finely drawn cast of
characters may solve the murder long before Detective Richard Contini
does, but no matter. The Dead of Winter is ultimately less a murder
mystery than a multi-layered tale of sexual obsession. Woven into the
narrative fabric are seminal events and periods in recent Quebec
history—the Duplessis era, the October Crisis, the Montreal
massacre—as well as sharply drawn portraits of small-town Quebec and
the thorny relations between Quebecers and Parisians. What sets this
novel apart from the average page-turner is the richly conveyed sense of
time and place, and the author’s ability to create fully realized
characters who engage our understanding, if not always our sympathies.