Outside The Line

By Christian Petersen

Dundurn Press
213 pages

ISBN 978 4 55002 859 1



Outside The Line is a dark, slow-moving noir by first time novelist Christian Petersen. He writes of Peter Ellis, a probation officer in a small city somewhere in the dusty interior of British Columbia. Recently separated, Ellis is stuck in an entry-level job with a house he can’t sell in a town so still even the rats have moved to Alberta. His ex has moved on to Southern California with her lesbian lover. Ellis isn’t going anywhere but to the bottom of a bottle. He smokes too much. He shops in the frozen dinner section of the grocery store. He only goes out to work. His next “client” is a one-season NHL wonder on bail for spousal abuse.

The case could be a feminist/Canuck cliché torn from the letters page of a weekly suburban newspaper. The jock is a minor celebrity whose hockey-enforcer buttons are easily pushed. His girl is a hottie with more bruises and brains than the men in her life. Ellis predictably greases his downhill slide by consorting with the victim, a clear no-no in the probations biz. This generates pages of standardized Can-lit interior dialogue from Ellis, a form Petersen has down pat. It becomes quite amusing, revealing absurdities of the criminal justice system when it comes to solving, or even mitigating the messy problems of people suffering familiar emotions. Then it all goes fluey in an explosion of raw violence.

It could be more erotic. Tension could build more consistently. Stick with it for the ending.

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