THE KILLING CIRCLE
By Andrew Pyper. Doubleday Canada. 321 pp. $29.95
****

How to write the great Canadian mystery novel:

• Set your story in a major Canadian city, one we all know and love to hate (i.e., Toronto).
• Make sure it’s winter. The coldest on record. Your characters must always be cold.
• Alternatively, set it in summer. The most miserable, humid, mosquito-ridden August heat wave imaginable. Just to set the record straight to the rest of the world: no, we don’t live in igloos. Year-round, anyway.
• Make your protagonist a writer — no, a journalist with a thinly-veiled phony national press, thereby providing commentary on the state of the Canadian media.
• Be sure your central characters include a quirky group of vaguely likeable characters in the Sarah Polley/Atom Egoyan mode — characters you definitely don’t want to see naked, but you don’t exactly want to see dead, either.
• Raise questions about truth as literature, fiction as truth and sound really, really smart.
• Include a loveable, insightful kid, wise beyond his years.
• Wax poetic about cornfields. And the bad guy who’s just disappeared into them with the loveable, insightful kid.
• Include at least one sex scene, one car crash, one ghost, one story-within-a-story, one dismembered body, one badly written poem discovered at a crime scene, one blood-drenched confession, and one dead police officer.
• If your name is Andrew Pyper, write The Killing Circle.

The Killing Circle is Toronto writer Andrew Pyper’s latest literary thriller, and he does not disappoint. Hailed as “one of Canada’s finest young writers” by the Vancouver Sun (impressive!), Pyper has the chops to take his murder mystery beyond the level of the mere whodunit and into “great Canadian novel” territory.

Here’s the premise. Patrick Rush, widower, is a B-list entertainment reporter trying to raise a young son on his own. A writer without a story, he joins a writers’ circle on a whim, with the hopes of discovering a story within himself. But instead of his own story, he discovers the ghostly murder tale told by Angela, the meek, quiet girl who sits in the corner. Her story is perfect: simply told, captivating, and even more dramatic when set against the backdrop of real murders gripping the city of Toronto, murders that eerily echo Angela’s story.

A year later, when Patrick hears of Angela’s accidental death, he can’t help himself: committing the mortal sin of plagiarism, he steals her work, embellishes it a little, and lo and behold, if the book doesn’t become a mega-literary success. Cross-country tours and movie deals come next, but when people start dying again, in ways similar to the ones in Patrick’s book, he becomes not only a suspect, but the next name on the potential victim list. So does his son.

The Killing Circle is a well-paced, well-told story. Pyper’s use of language is spare and confident, and his complex structure reveals plot points with enough tension to keep you turning pages. What raises the book beyond thriller, however, is Pyper’s pointed commentary on the “Canadian dream,” that drive for success and fame which, unlike the American dream, must not come at the cost of honesty and trust. When Rush pilfers Angela’s story, he sets into motion a series of horrific events that show what happens when Canadians don’t live up to our nice, polite, respectful reputation.

Pyper’s novel can be enjoyed on two levels: as a deliciously scary murder mystery and as a telling commentary on Canadian society. It’s hard to miss the implicit comparison to Americana in this book — according to Pyper, we Canadians are not as far removed from our southern neighbors as we might think.