4 ideas
When 13-year-old Katie Pine vanished from the Ojibwa reserve near Algonquin Bay, the police department classified her as a runaway. Detective John Cardinal kept working the case, and his persistence cost him standing inside the department.
Before any evidence is gathered, the social category of the missing person decides which explanation police reach for. A Native or poor teenager is presumed to have run away and a comfortable white one is presumed to be in danger, so the first label decides whether a crime officially exists.
In a hard northern climate, cold does two opposite things to evidence. Snow and ice hide bodies and cover tracks, and they close off places people would normally pass through.
Cardinal years earlier took money from a drug dealer's cache to pay for his daughter's education, and partner Lise Delorme is secretly assigned to investigate him while working beside him. The man most committed to justice for neglected victims is therefore himself guilty of a hidden corruption. His moral authority and his vulnerability come from the same place: he knows from the inside how rules get bent for people one loves.