Snow Job

August 31, 2009
In Arthur Ellis Award–winner Deverell’s rambling third novel to feature crafty lawyer Arthur Beauchamp (after 2008’s Kill All the Judges
), Igor Muckhali Ivanovich (aka Mad Igor), the dictator of the People’s Republic of Bhashyistan (formerly part of the U.S.S.R.), declares war on Canada after a diplomatic delegation from the Central Asian nation is blown to bits while visiting Ottawa. Beauchamp and CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) agent Ray DiPalma (“the shape-shifting spy who never came in from the cold”) go to Albania, where kidnappers have taken Arthur’s client, Abzal Erzhan, the prime suspect in the terrorist incident. The Canadian political satire may be of less interest to U.S. readers than a subplot involving three Saskatchewan women who go AWOL from a tour of Bhashyistan during the conflict. The journal extracts written by one of them about the three finding shelter with the Bhashyistani Democratic Revolutionary Front have a sharp focus the main plot lacks.