With Cold Truth, Ashley Kalagian Blunt has produced a chilling mystery crime novel with many intriguing turns and twists. Set mainly in Winnipeg, Manitoba, in midwinter, with temperatures sometimes approaching minus 40 degrees Celsius, the freeze is not the only thing that sends chills along your spine. As a person who has spent many years in Canada, Blunt knows exactly how it feels to be out in the cold:
Then the temperature dropped to minus 40 and stayed there for weeks. Typical prairie winters were either extremely cold but dry and sunny, or warmer with an excess of snow. This year was the worst of both. He was fed up with frostbite, fed up with shovelling, and fed up with his truck refusing to start…
It is in this hostile environment that Harlow, a woman in her 30s, runs a touring business called Secrets of Winnipeg. When her father goes missing, she devotes all her time and energy to finding him. Capable and determined, she battles through many difficult situations, which are further complicated by the love/hate relationship she has with younger sister, Blaise. “Sisters are like blisters,” according to Harlow. “You can’t forget they’re there, and sometimes they hurt you, but you can’t pop them to make them go away. They’re part of you, so you have to live with them.”
The ingenious plot, which unfurls at a snapping pace, also showcases quite how entwined the smartphone is with our daily lives. It’s hard to remember what it was like before these phones existed. And it is virtually impossible to remember how things were before you could find out about almost anything by searching the internet or communicating on social media. Fortunately for Harlow, she is very comfortable with technology and makes good use of it in the quest to find her father. Of course, she is not the only one with such skills.
Most of the novel focuses on what Harlow does, how she feels, how she thinks. Interspersed with her narrative are shorter passages following what the kidnappers of Harlow’s father are doing. This way of telling a story is a legitimate literary device that can raise tension and results in putting the reader in a favoured position compared to the protagonists. But how this is done matters, and here there seems little logic as to why certain snippets of information are suddenly made available to the reader. As a highly skilled writer, Blunt could easily have done this better.
In real life, coincidences occur, so why not in a novel? The danger of relying on coincidences in fiction is that they can detract from credibility. Harlow recognising a briefly once-seen face in another car in very heavy city traffic and giving chase unscathed is one such example.
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Blunt’s previous novel, Dark Mode, was a best seller and received a 4.5-star review from ArtsHub‘s reviewer. So, many readers will doubtless be eager to read Cold Truth. As a mystery novel, it is hard to put down. The unfamiliar setting of extreme cold weather is an additional lure for the Australian reader possibly sweltering in temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius. And the coincidences that bothered this reviewer may be as acceptable as they have to be in real life; we should be able to enjoy a whodunnit without expecting it to do more than just be entertaining.
Cold Truth, Ashley Kalagian Blunt
Publisher: Ultimo
ISBN: 9781761151682
Format: Paperback
Pages: 400pp
Publication: February 2025
RRP: $34.99
