The Spying Moon

At the start of this dour yet lucid police procedural from Ruttan (Suspicious Circumstances), Kendall Moreau, a recent graduate of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police training center, is on her way to her first posting. Since early childhood, everything she has done has been motivated by her desire to find out the truth about her mother’s disappearance, and now she’s set to be stationed in the area of British Columbia where it happened. But Kendall is redirected to the “beautiful but broken” town of Maple River to join a task force investigating drug traffickers. The team’s first meeting is interrupted by the news of the discovery of a body. At the scene, the police find teenager Sammy Petersen, “a good kid from a good home,” shot through the head. The postmortem reveals that he had a lethal dose of drugs in his system. Kendall soon finds that the drug problem is just the tip of the iceberg, and she suspects that at least one of her new colleagues may be involved in the murders, assaults, and robberies that are plaguing Maple River. The subject matter may be grim, but the Canadian sensibility—everyone is so sincere—is refreshing. (Sept.)