Most of the time, the Crime Writers of Canada recognizes the very best in the country’s crime fiction. The CWC’s membership is made up principally of published crime novelists who hand out annual Arthur Ellis Awards, named after Canada’s one-time official hangman, to the writers who have produced the previous year’s most distinguished work. But since 2007, the awards have included one that goes to the novelist who is most notable for writing a book that failed.

This award is for the Best Unpublished First Novel, and its winner comes from the legion of writers who have suffered the embarrassment of having their work turned down by publishers, agents and practically everybody else except their dearest relatives. The prize is known in the business as “the Unhanged Arthur.”

But now a first crime novelist named Deryn Collier has come along with evidence that not all contenders for the Unhanged Arthur belong in such a mortifying category. Collier’s Confined Space suggests that sometimes publishers just miss out on very good books the first time around. When Collier was shortlisted for Best Unpublished First Novel in 2010, her book came to the notice of a major publishing house, Simon & Schuster, which discovered that the novel offers an intelligently conceived, suspenseful and elegantly written story.

Events take place in the fictional B.C. interior town of Kootenay Landing where a vast beer-making plant owned by a company called Bugaboo Brewery is the town’s major employer. One holiday weekend, a millwright working alone in the plant gets fried to death inside one of the enormous bottle-washing tanks. A day later, the asphyxiated body of the millwright’s girlfriend turns up in a field next to the Bugaboo premises.

The chief cop in town, a bad tempered RCMP Staff Sergeant named Resnick, thinks carelessness and coincidence explain away the deaths. The local coroner, an ex-Canadian Army vet named Bern Fortin, disagrees. He thinks something fishy is up in Kootenay Landing, and Fortin, who emerges as the book’s complex and likeable central character, proves to be more right than anybody in town dreamed.

In making the plot a tense and tricky bit of business, Collier is close to masterful in presenting the crimes in the context of the working life in the staggeringly complex brewery. And she knows just how to insert into her story the right hints of menace to keep readers in a state of iffy balance.