The Tenderness of Wolves: A Novel

The year is 1867. Winter has just tightened its grip on Dove River, a tiny isolated settlement in the Northern Territory, when a man is brutally murdered. Laurent Jammett had been a voyageur for the Hudson Bay Company before an accident lamed him four years earlier. The same accident afforded him the little parcel of land in Dove River, land that the locals called unlucky due to the untimely death of the previous owner.

A local woman, Mrs. Ross, stumbles upon the crime scene and sees the tracks leading from the dead man's cabin north toward the forest and the tundra beyond. It is Mrs. Ross's knock on the door of the largest house in Caulfield that launches the investigation. Within hours she will regret that knock with a mother's love -- for soon she makes another discovery: her seventeen-year-old son Francis has disappeared and is now considered a prime suspect.

In the wake of such violence, people are drawn to the crime and to the township -- Andrew Knox, Dove River's elder statesman; Thomas Sturrock, a wily American itinerant trader; Donald Moody, the clumsy young Company representative; William Parker, a half-breed Native American and trapper who was briefly detained for Jammett's murder before becoming Mrs. Ross's guide. But the question remains: do these men want to solve the crime or exploit it?

One by one, the searchers set out from Dove River following the tracks across a desolate landscape -- home to only wild animals, madmen, and fugitives -- variously seeking a murderer, a son, two sisters missing for seventeen years, and a forgotten Native American culture before the snows settle and cover the tracks of the past for good.

In an astonishingly assured debut, Stef Penney deftly weaves adventure, suspense, revelation, and humor into an exhilarating thriller; a panoramic historical romance; a gripping murder mystery; and, ultimately, with the sheer scope and quality of her storytelling, an epic for the ages.

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All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Read, then Pass Along to a Friend, 2009-01-07
"The Tenderness of Wolves" has a little bit of everything: murder, whodunit, mystery, romance, location and adventure. Add in several subplots and you get a bit of complexity, too. However, these subplots have got to be tied together to successfully finish the story. Instead, without rehashing the details from other reviews, what we end up with is a general consensus that "The Tenderness of Wolves" lacks resolution - too many unanswered questions about many of the characters whom we developed a relationship with. I don't feel as though it is the reader's job to decipher so many dangling subplots. Actually, I see it as lazy writing. Still, Stef Penney's first novel is quite good.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Glacial Pacing Undercuts Story, 2009-01-04
Do you remember the Seinfeld episode where Elaine kept yelling "Just die!!" during the English Patient? If you do, then you'll have a good idea what my reaction was to The Tenderness of Wolves.

With a murder and a disappearance in the first 50 pages, the book starts out promising. However, after those 50 pages, the book degenerates into several story lines, each tenuously linked to one another. Stef Penny then spends the next 321 pages slowly discoursing on each of those storylines. Some, she resolves within the greater context of the story: others, she doesn't. But, each of these plot threads is teased out in an excruciating manner. By the time I got to page 200, I was screaming "Just solve the mystery!!"

If you like lots of atmosphere, glacial pacing, and pretensions of grandeur in your murder/mysteries, then The Tenderness of Wolves is for you. For most of us, other murder/mysteries will more than adequately replace The Tenderness of Wolves.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

A jewel, 2008-11-20
One of the most interesting stylistic books I've read. It's a 1st person narrative--sometimes, sort of .... There are prose passages that are so stunning they take my breath away. These are ususally tender emotive reflections. The story is a bit confuluted, but hey, it takes place in the Canadian wild in the 1860's--enough to drive any one into confusion. And so it does. All the great plots are here: Jealousy; Murder; Greed; Abandonment; Unrequited Love; Madness; Failure; Addiction; Suicide; Wilderness Survival; and Tenderness.


2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

cold northern Territories...and more than one mystery to solve., 2008-11-17
The frost in Dove River has preserved the body of Laurent Jammett, so it looks nearly just as a few minutes after he was murdered, when Mrs. Ross, a neighbor, finds Laurent in his cabin. The investigation by the magistrate, Andrew Knox, and by the men summoned from The Company, with young idealist Donald Moody at the helm, ensues, leading to unexpected discoveries.

The year is 1867, and the action takes place in the Northern Territories of Canada, when the settlers make their first steps at taming the vast stretches of the forest, fighting with the snow, overwhelming cold, and wild animals. The adventures wait for those who decide to move into the wilderness - and people live there for many reasons.

The construction of "The Thenderness of Wolves" allowed the author to speak using different voices, which include Mrs. Ross, a Scottish woman of mysterious past, who feels like a misfit everywhere; Francis Ross, her adopted son, who holds the key to the murder mystery; Donald Moody, a man desperate to do things right, waiting for the love of his life; Maria Knox, the older, sharp-witted and intelligent daughter of the magistrate; The magistrate Andrew Knox himself; and maybe the most intriguing persona, Thomas Sturrock, who is searching for the proof of the native written language. Very short chapters, changing between the voices, organized into four volumes, keep the reader from boredom (in fact, they keep the reader glued to the book, especially that nearly every chapter reveals something crucial to the story or provides an unexpected twist).

The novel is written with passion, the rendering of the cold climate and crude surroundings, as well as the great characters, who are real people, with strengths and weaknesses, with yearnings and painful past, make it an engrossing, hard to put down book. The places like Himmelvanger, a Norwegian Lutheran community, hidden deep in the woods, different remote and forgotten trading posts, and finally, Dove River and the Caulfield community are depicted with great detail, so that I could see them vividly in my imagination. I liked very much the native people, Jacob, Donald's friend, and scary William Parker, Elizabeth Bird and the inhabitants of Hanover post (except Stewart and Nesbit, the Company officials). All of them seem to carry a secret...The Himmelvanger community was also very picturesque and not quite as it might seem...

The mystery of Jammett's murder is only one of many in this novel: the disappearance of teenage Amy and Eve Seton, the bone plaque and Francis's secret are a few others. Not all the threads are finished; the main question is solved, but some of the smaller, but equally interesting themes are abandoned or abruptly cut, like the author did not have an idea how to weave them into the story so that everything ends smoothly within the volume she planned.

However, "The Tenderness of Wolves" is a most interesting debut novel, which earned the Costa Award. I will wait for Stef Penney's new novel or any news of it, because I am very curious what this promising novelist can come up with next.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

Lyrical - one of the best books I have read in a long time, 2008-11-15
I did not want this book to end and it stayed with me for quite some time.

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