New York: Crown, 2026
US$28 eBook
Reviewed by Lena Leimgruber Haraldsson
There is a wide sea of thrillers set in the Arctic, but Malcolm Kempt’s debut novel, A Gift Before Dying, is different. Most entries in the Arctic thriller genre lean heavily on established tropes: wildlife biologists fighting poachers in action-heavy plots like Alice Henderson’s A Blizzard of Polar Bears or high-stakes military tech mysteries such as Dale Brown’s Arctic Storm Rising. While these books use the frozen landscape as a dramatic, often hostile backdrop for heroism, Kempt’s interest in writing clearly stems from the environment itself, rather than choosing the Arctic simply to fit a thriller mold. Having worked as a criminal lawyer in the remote Arctic almost two decades, Kempt writes with the weary authority of someone who has lived the reality of the Canadian North rather than someone who has researched it in a library.
The novel follows a tightly wound 41-chapter structure that alternates between two deeply damaged perspectives: Sergeant Elderick Cole, a “Southern” policeman haunted by a botched investigation in Alberta, and Maliktu Kullu, a ten-year-old Inuit boy disfigured by a childhood fire. The story begins with a grim discovery: the apparent suicide of sixteen-year-old Pitseolala in an unlit apartment in Cape Dorset. Cole, however, notices inconsistencies that suggest a staged scene. As Cole navigates the bureaucratic and physical hurdles of a remote investigation, Maliktu undergoes a spiritual journey, guided by visions of his dead sister to “kill the devil”responsible for her death.
Kempt’s portrayal of Inuit communities avoids the romanticized imagery often found in Northern fiction. Instead, he presents a “pressure cooker of social ills” driven by “[h]arsh weather, rampant substance abuse, lack of treatment resources, and pure isolation.” The lack of basic infrastructure is palpable; Cole’s smartphone becomes an “overpriced dictation machine” because there is no reliable cell service. The housing units are identical, overcrowded pre-fabricated units where “violence lingered as a potential solution to every problem.” Kempt describes a world where the “never-ending night” of winter is strangely comforting because, like the drifting snow, “it hid the ugliness around him.”
As a non-Inuit writer, Kempt approaches the depiction of Northern communities with notable care. At times, the descriptions carry a slight sense of obligation, as if the narrative pauses to ensure that readers unfamiliar with Arctic life fully grasp the structural conditions shaping it. Yet this impulse ultimately strengthens the novel rather than weakening it. The explanations are measured and respectful, and they help situate the story within the broader realities faced by many Northern communities. The issues Kempt depicts (overcrowded housing, strained infrastructure, substance abuse, high rates of suicide, the weight of isolation, to give just a few examples) echo widely documented experiences in Inuit regions. Importantly, these conditions are not framed as exotic tragedies of the Arctic but as complex social realities affecting both Inuit and non-Inuit residents of the North. In this way, the novel’s attention to detail feels less like exposition and more like a careful act of witnessing.
The environment is clearly not just a setting; it is a character that dictates the logic of life and death. The ground is so hard with permafrost that an excavator is required for a shallow grave, and the cold is so absolute that a body in an unheated apartment becomes frozen solid within hours. Kempt uses this environment to ground his foray into what might initially appear as magical realism. Maliktu’s connection to his sister transcends the psychological; he sees her face beneath the frozen water, her “eyes blank, her mouth gaped wide,” and later, in the room where she died, she physically interacts with him by talking to him, and he feels her phantom breath “hot and tangible on his skin.” Yet these moments do not feel like a literary flourish imposed from outside. Instead, they resonate with the long tradition of Inuit storytelling in which the spiritual and physical worlds coexist, and where the land, the sea, and the dead remain active presences in everyday life.
However, perhaps the most daring aspect of the novel is the narrator and main character, Sergeant Cole. He is a man in the throes of a downward spiral, self-medicating with blue and white pills and an alcohol problem to cope with the botched investigation that ruined his career and his family. His rage is often misplaced and terrifying; in a moment of extreme psychological pressure, he executes a chained, suffering dog in front of a group of children -- a choice that stays with the reader and forces a difficult reckoning with Cole’s character.
The novel reaches a fever pitch in chapter 30, during an exorcism scene. As an evangelical preacher, Avon Desmond, attempts to cast out demons from a suicidal teenager, the room dissolves into a maelstrom of chanting and holy water. The tension of the community’s trauma explodes when Cole, disoriented by the noise and discomfort, discharges his weapon three times into the floor. His subsequent punch to the preacher’s chin is a visceral moment of a man finally breaking under the weight of burnout in a place that will “burn you alive if you let it.” The motif of burning alive functions both as a chilling metaphorical warning and a literal threat that bookends the novel's climax.
The meaning of the title, A Gift Before Dying, resonates throughout the narrative. It suggests that in a landscape defined by suffering, the gift is often a release from consciousness or trauma. Early on, Cole reflects that being able to sleep would be a gift and later, after a self-destructive outburst, he notes that losing consciousness was a gift. The gold cross Maliktu recovers is also considered a gift before dying, a token of protection Pitseolala may have intended for her brother. Ultimately, the gift is Cole’s final transition. In the final chapter, as he succumbs to his wounds he suffered during a fight with the antagonist and Pitseolala’s killer, he enters a spiritual iglu. There, he finds Pitseolala who takes his hand and blows out the flames of her lamp. It is a peaceful, spiritual ending that elevates the book from a standard procedural to a profound meditation on the Arctic soul.
A Gift Before Dying is a remarkable work of Arctic noir. Kempt’s prose is raw, capturing both the beauty and the quiet isolation of the North while exposing the jagged, unhealed wounds carried by the people who live there. The novel moves confidently between procedural investigation, psychological descent, and spiritual reckoning, creating a narrative that feels both grounded and hauntingly otherworldly. In doing so, Kempt elevates what could have been a conventional Arctic thriller into something far more resonant: a meditation on trauma, survival, and the fragile threads that bind communities together in one of the most unforgiving landscapes on earth. For readers who think they already know the Arctic thriller, Kempt’s debut is a necessary, and chilling, education.
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