Sometimes you get the bear; most times, the bear gets you.
The Icelandic superhit television series, Trapped, mixed complex family dynamics with police procedural detail to plot a tense, suspense-filled mystery against the backdrop of Iceland’s unforgiving landscape. Trapped premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival, and made a star of Ólafur Darri Ólafsson, who played Andri, chief of police in the isolated northern town of Seyðisfjörður.
Well, imagine Andri as an older widower with profound hearing loss, living in an isolated cabin on the wild, secluded shore of Lake Huron in Northern Ontario. That’s Mark Roth, the unlikely hero of John Degen’s Seldom Seen Road — the first in a planned series of Burnt River mystery novels set along remote stretches of the TransCanada Highway as it cuts through the Canadian Shield.
While Mark is no hardened lawman, he is just as beaten and confused by the state of his home life as Trapped’s newly-divorced Andri — left bereaved and lonely, with an adult daughter removed by distance and various resentments, Mark struggles to stay present as his home (and life?) is slowly swallowed by the deep northern woods.
The high-profile murder of a local environmental activist pulls Mark out of his navel-gazing and turns him into a classic busybody amateur sleuth. One who can’t help but put himself in danger as he noses into other people’s business.
Father Brown of the Bush. Miss Marple of Manitoulin.
Drawn from the traditions of Scandinavia’s Nordic Noir, Seldom Seen Road can be read as a Canadian literary effort to turn our interest from traditional cultural obsessions to the south, and find the natural sympatico we share with other arctic nations. Trapped’s plot plays out within the ever-present threat of powerful natural forces — Andri races an approaching superstorm as he hunts his suspect. With pages decorated by Northern Ontario’s freezing water, bears, ravens, lamprey eels, and trackless forests, Seldom Seen Road covers similar ground.
Author John Degen has noted future books in the Burnt River series will see characters travel here and there throughout traditional Nordic Noir territory, including to Iceland. So, who knows, maybe there’s a crossover between Trapped and Seldom Seen Road in the future.
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Thank you to publisher Heather Campbell for sharing Seldom Seen Road with us! Find a copy here on All Lit Up, or from your local independent bookseller.
