Lawyer and Tsawwassen First Nations member Hallee Landry is in Kamloops, British Columbia to attend a Pow Wow and press her advocacy services to tribal leaders when she’s abducted. Hallee regains consciousness, hooded and bound in the back of a truck, which one of her kidnappers—“wearing a MAGA hat, camouflage style”—crashes almost immediately. Quickly rescued by two passersby, Hallee is able to make her meeting with one Sister Valerie O’Connor later that day. There her world is turned upside down again: “We three people here, while unable to live close ties with your mother, are the three people more intimately familiar with your grandmother than anyone else alive today,” says Sister Valerie. Hallee was told her mother died in childbirth. What connection could she have to a nun who worked at South Thompson Indian Residential School? The answer will unravel decades-old crimes, shine a light on Hallee’s origins, and bring a great evil to justice.
Ray Anthony Morris’s KILL POCAHONTAS is a contemporary thriller that takes an unflinching look at the trauma and horrors perpetrated on First Nations peoples in the mid-20th century by Canada’s Indian Residential School system and the Catholic Church. With flashbacks to the 1950s, the novel unfolds from multiple points of view and from multiple points in time. This includes recollections from attendees of South Thompson Indian Residential School (apparently based on the real-life Kamloops Indian Residential School, which operated from 1890–1978), who are now helping Hallee uncover her past and the cause of her present endangerment.
Such an intricate storyline requires a clear roadmap throughout, but character name and date tags are not enough to organize the different threads of the story. As it stands, the flow of the narrative is choppy and sometimes outright difficult to follow. Side plots featuring minor characters with their own POVs also work against narrative cogency. When it comes to characterization and voice, all characters are portrayed with the same flat voice, muting what could have been a colorful ensemble. The character dialogue, in particular, is often so wooden as to be unbelievable as natural speech. At best, these elements distract from the story itself. At worst, they may confound the reader. The novel could use an editor to help with overall clarity and develop believable character voices and dialogue.
On a technical level, the copy editing is sound, though egregious misuses of scare quotes (such as “silence paradoxically so blare-booming and mind-clangingly ‘loud’ as to freeze my very mind from any cognizance whatever” or “He appeared to make a ‘sign of the cross’ with it”) and abrupt changes from first- to third-person narration are notable exceptions. The book’s pacing is appropriate: by turns tense, breathless, and reflective, as the story required. The novel’s impetus—the institutionalized assimilation of First Nations people—is powerful, and an underexplored theme in contemporary fiction, let alone in the thriller genre. Based on its topic alone, KILL POCAHONTAS will surely interest thriller and suspense fans, as well as followers of Indigenous history in North America.
With a gripping premise grounded in real events, Ray Anthony Morris’s KILL POCAHONTAS has the makings of a unique thriller.
~Remy P. for IndieReader