The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney

When Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves, opens, it’s 1867 and winter in Dove River, an isolated settlement located in Canada, where nothing much has happened since the disappearance of two young girls seventeen years earlier. All the more startling then, when the enigmatic central character, Mrs. Ross, discovers a man brutally murdered, tracks leaving his cabin heading north toward the forest and the tundra beyond, and her teenage son, Francis, missing. Francis and the dead man were friends. Is there a connection?

In the wake of these troubling events, strangers are drawn to Dove River—journalists, Hudson’s Bay Company men, trappers, traders. Do these people want to solve the mysteries of violence and disappearance, or exploit them? Assembled searchers, each driven by their own complex reasons, set out into a desolate and dangerous landscape to variously seek a murderer, a son, two missing sisters, a First Nations culture, and fortune, just as winter’s grip begins to tighten.

A stirring and atmospheric debut novel relayed through multiple points of view, The Tenderness of Wolves deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation, and humor into a historical romance, an exhilarating thriller, and keen murder mystery.