To Our Graves by Paul Nicholas Mason

The idea that anyone could be the killer is at the centre of To Our Graves, the newest novel from Paul Nicholas Mason.

And that — that anyone could have done it — is enough to make you want to read it, but there are things that just didn’t work for me. Although, they may for others.

After an unlikable student is found dead in the school’s chapel at an Ontario private school, we are given sneak peeks into the lives of those who live and work at the school as the case unfolds. Additionally, we follow the investigators and a few others connected to the case.

There were so many red herrings that I didn’t know what to think or who to pin the murder on. 

Could it be the bullied classmate that literally has the name Graves? Could it be the local public school student he sold cannabis to? What about the students he spent his last evening with? This is something I both liked and disliked about To Our Graves. 

I liked the idea that it was hard to tell who did it, and it seemed that everyone might have had a motive, but nothing was explicitly stated. This kept me guessing, but it also is a fault in my opinion. We spent so little time with individual characters before bouncing to another that I often forgot who someone was, and for many (especially the killer), I found myself saying “who?” At the end, I felt I should have a Law and Order style case board just to track characters and connections to the case. (To his credit, Mason has a three-page list of characters at the beginning, but it still involved some flipping back and forth that took me out of the story.)

That aside, I really liked that we covered about a day and a half of the investigation, kind of in a 24hr-style way. Most mysteries/crime novels I read cover several days of investigation, so seeing things develop in real-time was a surprising and welcome style. If you don’t mind having a large cast of characters to weed through, then To Our Graves is the book for you. And, faults aside, it made want to check out Mason’s other books as well.

Katie Ingram

Katie Ingram is a freelance journalist and the author of Breaking Disaster: Newspaper Stories of the Halifax Explosion.She’s also a part-time instructor with the University of King’s College School of Journalism.

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