The Devil's Making: A Mystery

Winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel

In the ramshackle capital of one of the last colonies in North America, a few thousand settlers aspire to the values of the Victorian age while coexisting beside a population of native Indians that vastly outnumbers them. Their cautious peace is challenged when a body is discovered: Dr. McCrory, an American alienist whose methods included phrenology, Mesmerism, and sexual-mystical magnetation.

Chad Hobbes, recently arrived from England, is the policeman who must solve the crime. At first it seems the murderer was an Indian medicine man who has already been arrested. It would be easy for Hobbes to let him swing for the murder, but his own interest in an Indian woman from the same tribe causes him to look at the case in more detail. And once he does, he discovers that everyone who knew McCrory seems to have something to hide.

Winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel, Sean Haldane's The Devil's Making portrays a frontier where cultures clashed on the eve of a new country's birth.