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Ragged Lake

di Ron Corbett

Serie: Frank Yakabuski (1)

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Gruesome murders, a northern secret, and a buried past While working one afternoon on the Northern Divide, a young tree-marker makes a grisly discovery: in a squatter's cabin near an old mill town, a family has been murdered. An army vet coming off a successful turn leading a task force that took down infamous biker criminals, Detective Frank Yakabuski arrives in Ragged Lake, a nearly abandoned village, to solve the family's murder. But no one is willing to talk. With a winter storm coming, Yakabuski sequesters the locals in a fishing lodge as he investigates the area with his two junior officers. Before long, he is fighting not only to solve the crime but also to stay alive and protect the few innocents left living in the desolate woods. A richly atmospheric mystery with sweeping backdrops, explosive action, and memorable villains, Ragged Lake will keep you guessing -- about the violent crime, the nature of family, and secret deeds done long ago on abandoned frontiers.… (altro)
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I was checking out the 2018 Edgar Awards winners and nominees and came across this title. What really caught my attention is the name of the protagonist, Detective Frank Yakabuski , since Yakabuski is my surname. It is not a common name, especially with this anglicized spelling, except in the Madawaska Valley northwest of Ottawa.

Detective Frank Yakabuski is sent to investigate the triple murder of a secretive family living on the Northern Divide where they built a ramshackle cabin near the almost-deserted community of Ragged Lake. Yakabuski sequesters the locals at the local lodge while he conducts his investigation. He quickly comes to suspect that a motorcycle gang with which he is familiar has moved into the area and may have been responsible for the murders.

Readers should be forewarned that that this is a violent story. The book begins with the gruesome murder of three people, including a child, and by the end, the body count is well into double digits. Both the innocent and the guilty are killed.

The pace is uneven. Early in the investigation, Yakabuski finds the journal of Lucy Whiteduck, the murdered woman. From the journal, we learn about Lucy’s childhood, her time in the big city of Springfield, and her return to the Northern Divide. The journal is necessary for important background information which impacts the present but its inclusion slows down the pace. Then there is a protracted face-off scene where things happen at a frenetic speed.

Apparently, this is the first in a series of books featuring Det. Yakabuski. Considerable background information, therefore, is given about the man. He is an army veteran who served with distinction in several of the world’s trouble spots. As a police officer, he has earned the respect of colleagues. He is definitely a leader who can think logically even in very tense situations. It also becomes obvious that he is willing to bend the rules if he thinks doing so will cause the least harm.

Some of the secondary characters emerge as interesting people since some effort was made to portray them in some depth. The villains, however, are stereotypes; they tend to be totally evil with no redeeming qualities. Yakabuski thinks of the inhabitants of Ragged Lake as “living cheek-to-jowl with true evil” and one character even says, “’There is someone in Ragged Lake who is nothing but evil.’” And then a villain tells Yakabuski there awaits a new sort of evil, “some new sort of whacked-out freak. Something truly fuckin’evil” which Yakabuski has “never seen before.” Is this the prelude to another blood-soaked investigation?

It is the geography of this book which is frustrating. In an author’s note at the beginning, Corbett mentions that since this is a work of fiction, all places are imagined and “there are no literal depictions of any city or town on the Divide.” Springfield, “a northern city of nearly a million people” is supposedly the creation of the author’s imagination, yet he refers to Britannia Heights, Sandy Hill (which has the main campus of the University of Springfield), and Buckham’s Bay, all neighbourhoods of Ottawa. Lucy even applies for a job in “a kids’ store in the Springfield shopping mall called Tiggy Winkles.” I’ve visited Mrs. Tiggy Winkles in the Rideau Centre in Ottawa! I attended the University of Ottawa in the Sandy Hill neighbourhood of Ottawa; on the eastern edge of that neighbourhood likes Strathcona Park. Why does Corbett make it Strathconna? Why bother disguising Ottawa as Springfield? Why mention real village names like Cobden and then make up fake ones like Grimsly? And why change John Rudolphus Booth, lumber tycoon and railroad baron of the Ottawa Valley, to James Rundle Bath?

The Northern Divide is indeed “about four hundred miles” from Ottawa. (I know this because for five years I lived in northern Ontario, not far from the Quebec border; about 25 kms away was a watershed sign which indicates that all waters north of this point flow into the Arctic and all waters south of this point flow into the Atlantic.) Yet Corbett chose to name his Northern Divide town after an actual lake in the southern part of Algonquin Park?

Det. Yakabuski is from High River, “the oldest Polish settlement in Canada . . . in the Upper Springfield Valley.” Why not have him come from Wilno, located in the Upper Ottawa Valley, which is the actual first and oldest Polish settlement in Canada? The surname Yakabuski is very common in the village of Barry’s Bay (10 kms from Wilno), the village where I was born. I’d be willing to bet that is where the author saw the name on his travels between his hometown of Ottawa and Algonquin Park. In Barry’s Bay, he might even have met a Frank Yakabuski!

Perhaps I have an unusual perspective on this book because of my name and where I’ve lived, but I found Corbett’s imagination to be strangely unimaginative. Corbett is almost insulting to the reader; it is as if Corbett expects his readers to be stupid. Two characters in the novel have a conversation about an Englishman who claimed to be an Apache chief. The reader is not to have heard of Archibald Belaney who called himself Grey Owl?

I was hoping to really like this book, but I’m afraid I found it only mediocre. I am not surprised that it did not win an Edgar Award.

Note: Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.ca/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski). ( )
  Schatje | May 11, 2018 |
The strongest character in Ragged Lake is the bleak, remote, and frozen woods of the Northern Divide. The land has helped to shape the people living there into self-sufficient individuals who are used to doing for themselves and keeping what they know to themselves. The man sent to investigate the murders, Frank Yakabuski, is a big man who knows how to handle himself. After taking one look, very few people want to mess with him. As a lead investigator, I found him to be a bit inconsistent. Sometimes he wouldn't take risks because they were dangerous and unlikely to succeed, yet at others, he took equally dangerous risks that also had very little chance of success. I have to admit that I found it difficult to warm up to him or any of the other characters.

The pace of the book is a bit uneven, mainly due to some digressions that--although crucial to the plot-- could've been more smoothly introduced. The strongest parts of the book are the setting, which I mentioned earlier, and the mystery itself, which kept me guessing at motives throughout. However, the body count in Ragged Lake was much too high for my liking. If I'd known one major detail (which is left out of the synopsis), I probably would not have chosen to read the book. ( )
  cathyskye | Oct 3, 2017 |
The focus and strength of this book is largely the setting. Corbett shows us the mostly abandoned, snow-covered, unforgiving land. He does such a great job of placing us in this setting that I found myself chilled, despite sitting here in Florida where the temperature was hovering near 90.

Pacing is slow up to the last quarter, when everything starts to come together (or unravel). The focus on setting and the history of the land often overshadows the murders and investigation. We also spend a lot of time with Yakabuski reflecting back to his childhood and to his time in the military. Some of the details in these lengthy passages eventually play into the present events, but it's a long, circuitous route getting there.

Then we have the murdered woman's journal interjected throughout. Dozens of pages of this journal are plunked into several different sections of the book. We learn her entire life history through this journal. Granted, her story on its own is interesting and would have been compelling had she been the focus in real time. But, shared this way, it only served as a disconnect from the current timeline. Too much of the story takes place in other characters' past, and I lost the intensity and immediacy of the actual investigation.

When we finally get to the action nearing the end, I found it difficult to like or relate to Yakabuski. He seems to have no problem placing innocent people at risk so that he can register a win by capturing the bad guys.

At the end, we have a little thread left dangling, which I assume will continue on in the next book. Despite that, this book does have a solid ending on its own.

*I received an advance copy from the publisher, via Amazon Vine, in exchange for my honest review.* ( )
  Darcia | Sep 28, 2017 |
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Gruesome murders, a northern secret, and a buried past While working one afternoon on the Northern Divide, a young tree-marker makes a grisly discovery: in a squatter's cabin near an old mill town, a family has been murdered. An army vet coming off a successful turn leading a task force that took down infamous biker criminals, Detective Frank Yakabuski arrives in Ragged Lake, a nearly abandoned village, to solve the family's murder. But no one is willing to talk. With a winter storm coming, Yakabuski sequesters the locals in a fishing lodge as he investigates the area with his two junior officers. Before long, he is fighting not only to solve the crime but also to stay alive and protect the few innocents left living in the desolate woods. A richly atmospheric mystery with sweeping backdrops, explosive action, and memorable villains, Ragged Lake will keep you guessing -- about the violent crime, the nature of family, and secret deeds done long ago on abandoned frontiers.

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