A Gift Before Dying

A Novel

By: Malcolm Kempt

Narrated by: Stephen Mendel

“Hypnotically good—instantly immersive, intense, and ultimately inspiring.”—Lee Child, New York Times bestselling author of the Jack Reacher series

In a hauntingly atmospheric novel set against the unforgiving landscape of the Arctic Circle, a disgraced police investigator discovers that his path to redemption is paved with ice—and blood.

"Kempt, who worked as a criminal lawyer in the Arctic for almost two decades, conjures this forbidding landscape and its residents with artful authority.”—The Wall Street Journal

After a botched high-profile murder investigation, Corporal Elderick Cole is exiled to the remote, rugged landscape of Nunavut, a vast territory in the Arctic Circle known for its untamed beauty, frigid temperatures, and endless winter nights. With his family having severed all ties, Cole waits out the result of a civil lawsuit alone—the wrong verdict could end what’s left of his flailing career.

His bleak existence takes a sinister turn when he discovers the hanging body of Pitseolala, a troubled Inuit girl whom he had sworn to protect. Her death dredges up demons he thought he’d buried along with the scars of a fractured marriage and the aching divide between him and his estranged daughter.

As Cole’s life unravels—and with it, the fragile thread of his investigation, he turns to Pitseolala’s younger brother, Maliktu, a fellow outsider. It’s then that Cole uncovers what binds them—a singular mission to find her killer.

Against fierce backlash, Cole’s overriding desire to redeem just one aspect of his otherwise failed life becomes an obsession—and he’s willing to break every rule in his unyielding pursuit of justice and the smallest shred of redemption.

What an interesting story

Interesting flawed characters. The ‘who done it’ is not revealed until the end. It’s a thriller and a supernatural story. Kept me interested throughout all the chapters. It’s also a fascinating view of Inuit culture and struggles.

Captivating

Unusual and compelling, this story has a harsh Arctic setting and a protagonist that you care about as he deals with personal issues and tries to take care of an Inuit village where problems seem insurmountable. Well detailed with a suspenseful atmosphere, the story is also well paced with excellently drawn characters, and an unforgettable ending.

Lost in the details

Way too much minutia ... found myself drifting away ... story boring at times and confusing at others ... this could have been told in half the time

horror...this is a horror book

no thanks, don't like horror mislabeled moir. reader was really good, wish they didn't veer into creepy and gross

What can you trust when you can’t trust yourself?

Malcolm Kempt’s A Gift Before Dying announces itself as a police procedural set in the Arctic Circle, but beneath the genre machinery runs a deeper inquiry: What is truth in a place where reality itself feels contested? Where colonial systems and Indigenous knowledge produce competing stories about what happened, what matters, and who counts?
Corporal Elderick Cole is a hard-boiled detective in the truest sense—not just cynical but broken, exiled to Nunavut after a catastrophic professional failure, estranged from everyone who once mattered to him. When he discovers the body of Pitseolala, a young Inuit girl he’d tried to protect, ruled a suicide, he can’t let it go. But Cole’s judgment is compromised. His perception may be unreliable. The girl’s ghost may or may not be appearing to her little brother—and to him.
This is emphatically not a cozy mystery. The landscape is punishing: endless dark, brutal cold, isolation that erodes sanity. Kempt, who spent seventeen years as a criminal lawyer in the Arctic, renders this world with visceral authority. The cold becomes a character, the darkness a kind of epistemological condition. How do you investigate anything when you can barely see?
What elevates this debut is its refusal to offer easy answers about knowledge, justice, or redemption. Cole wants to make things right, but the novel asks whether an outsider can make things right—whether his obsessive investigation serves the community or himself. The ghost story elements hover at the edges of the procedural like a question the genre can’t quite answer.
A confident, unsettling debut.