The Lives We Try to Lead: Review of The Jade Butterfly

cover52634-mediumThe Jade Butterfly by Jeffrey Round

Thanks to NetGalley and Dundurn for the review copy. The Jade Butterfly will be available for purchase on March 3, 2015

This is book three in the Dan Sharp series. If you haven’t read books one and two, the author does a good job of keeping the new reader informed without getting too specific, but with the title release more than three months away, and the first two books available as a bundle right now, I recommend catching yourself up on some good new-fashioned Canadian noir.

In this installment, Dan meets a mysterious Chinese diplomat with a simple request: Find his sister, who’s been presumed dead for more than 20 years, but who appeared on the website of a Canadian bakery only months before.

What follows is a tale of international intrigue, the rebelliousness of youth, the folly of best intentions, and the horrors of what happens when we try our hardest, but still fail spectacularly.

Jeffrey Round knows how to write suspense. All the little threads of coincidence and desire that tie us to each other are strung taught at his whim. New readers will be able to follow the plot, but the larger tensions of family and personal history that follow Dan from the from book one may be lost on them.

Above everything, Dan is a good man trying to do right in a hard world. There are circumstances beyond his control, that’s a given. But the real art is how Round lays out those elements of our lives that we do have control over: How we treat our family, how we choose our lovers; that can mean the difference between happiness and ruin when taken in aggregate. You try to do right, to solve the unsolvable problems of your life, to prioritize those things you hold most dear, and yet, there is always something to get in the way; some trick of fate that pushes you over the edge, that ruins all your carefully laid plans.

That’s the real suspense in a Dan Sharp book. That’s the hook that keeps you coming back for more. It’s almost a uniquely Canadian kind of writing. It’s not the absence of connection that builds tension in these books, it’s the perilous nature of the connections we do have. It’s not only the world as we know it that’s dark, it’s the ways it could be even darker than it is. It’s the vast, unavoidable distance that stretches between who we are and who we try to be.

5 stars out of 5