The Cottagers: A Novel

Canadian Murder Mystery

There is something thin-seeming about the vacationland mystery novel; it's too easy to imagine the author, bored of sun and beer, and out of ideas, suddenly looking about him for inspiration. And, perhaps more importantly, windblown beaches and rustic shingles will always be the poor cousins of those ominous shadows creeping across the lawns of suburbia -- in the world of fiction, at any rate.

Marshall N. Klimasewiski's The Cottagers, which is set in East Sooke, Vancouver Island, a community of rentable little houses with a rocky beach and single road, does not suffer from these symptoms. It is a first novel, for one thing, and thus plenty packed with elements. There are the eyes, courtesy of one Cyrus Collingwood, a vaguely sociopathic local teenager with big ideas about his own genius, who resentfully watches the vacationers come and go. There is a bit of literary history, in the form of a lost journal by Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll. There is the comedy of couples, brought to us by the enviable, lovely Samina and Nicholas, and the mean-spirited, adulterous Greg and Laurel, three of the four of them academics. These old friends descend on their rented cottage, observed by Cyrus, one of them destined not to reemerge into the real world.

The Cottagers is a book wise to human foibles, rich with precise and amusing observations of its characters. It cannot truly be called suspenseful -- despite the murder mystery plot, it is too cluttered with literary devices, ideas about what it is to know and be known by others, and the personal histories of minor characters. But then, what else do we read for?

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