Nicky Ryan has been a police officer in Canada’s Northwest Territories for six months when she’s faced with her first homicide investigation. A teenage girl has been maimed, her mother murdered, and her father is the prime suspect. Nicky’s naïve dream of heroic crime-fighting is now up against the reality of  life and death in a small Indigenous community. In Fort Gabriel, the wounds of the past still bleed, and white cops from down south are neither trusted nor welcomed.

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Alison’s mother is dead and her father is in jail. Her aunt Lucy brings her to Yellowknife, where Alison desperately wants solid ground in a world that keeps shifting like melting river ice. Instead, she has to go back to Fort Gabriel to testify. She needs to hide, to find some way to feel safe in her own skin. When she turns to the faith and practices of Islam for that refuge, no one seems to accept or understand it. 

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It’s Nicky’s job to find out what really happened that night and bring the killer to justice, but she is learning the hard way that being the rookie, female, and lesbian member of the RCMP team will only make that job harder for her. Worse, the criminal justice  system’s relentless grind can only make everything more painful for Alison, her family, and their community. 

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Can justice be worth the painful cost?