The Tenderness of Wolves won not only the 2006 Costa First Novel Award but was overall Costa Book of the Year. It is an ambitious work. Stef Penney writes well enough to win plaudits for a much simpler story, but she gives us historical romance, murder and mystery.

The novel is set in Canada in 1867. Mrs Ross seems unfriendly, but half the novel is written from her perspective, so we slowly warm to her and begin to understand her demeanour. She finds the body of Laurent Jammet, her closest neighbour and a hunter of wolves. He has been scalped. To add to the shock, her 17-year-old son has vanished on the day of the murder. Penney throws another mystery into the mix. Two young sisters have been missing for years and an industry of sorts has grown out of their disappearance and the search for them. Jammet was one who had tried and failed to track them There is much tracking in this novel and, to Penney’s credit, I did not skip a single description of it. The author has never been to Canada and has worked hard at her research for she writes as if she too had had to camp in the forests, frightened by the whiteness of endless snow and the howling of wolves.

This is a classic tale of good guys and bad guys and the triumph of love over hate and good over evil – delivered with a lovely twist. Mrs Ross, a sort of John Wayne in drag, hitches up her skirts and leaves behind the coffee house gossip to find her son, whom she refuses to believe is responsible for Jammet’s demise.

The Tenderness of Wolves by Stef Penney

Quercus, £7.99, 466pp

Buy the book here for the offer price of £6.39 (free p&p)

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