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The Tenderness of Wolves
Stef Penney
Simon & Schuster
March 2008
On Sale: March 4, 2008
400 pages
ISBN: 1416571302
EAN: 9781416571308
Paperback
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Thriller | Mystery Historical
A brilliant and breathtaking debut that captivated
readers and garnered critical acclaim in the United
Kingdom, The Tenderness of Wolves was long-listed for
the Orange Prize in fiction and won the Costa Award
(formerly the Whitbread) Book of the Year. The year is
1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, a
tiny isolated settlement in the Northern Territory, when a
man is brutally murdered. Laurent Jammett had been a
voyageur for the Hudson Bay Company before an accident lamed
him four years earlier. The same accident afforded him the
little parcel of land in Dove River, land that the locals
called unlucky due to the untimely death of the previous
owner. A local woman, Mrs. Ross, stumbles upon the crime
scene and sees the tracks leading from the dead man's cabin
north toward the forest and the tundra beyond. It is Mrs.
Ross's knock on the door of the largest house in Caulfield
that launches the investigation. Within hours she will
regret that knock with a mother's love -- for soon she makes
another discovery: her seventeen-year-old son Francis has
disappeared and is now considered a prime suspect. In the
wake of such violence, people are drawn to the crime and to
the township -- Andrew Knox, Dove River's elder statesman;
Thomas Sturrock, a wily American itinerant trader; Donald
Moody, the clumsy young Company representative; William
Parker, a half-breed Native American and trapper who was
briefly detained for Jammett's murder before becoming Mrs.
Ross's guide. But the question remains: do these men want to
solve the crime or exploit it? One by one, the searchers
set out from Dove River following the tracks across a
desolate landscape -- home to only wild animals, madmen, and
fugitives -- variously seeking a murderer, a son, two
sisters missing for seventeen years, and a forgotten Native
American culture before the snows settle and cover the
tracks of the past for good. In an astonishingly assured
debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense,
revelation, and humor into an exhilarating thriller; a
panoramic historical romance; a gripping murder mystery;
and, ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her
storytelling, an epic for the ages.
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