EARLIER IN HIS CAREER, Michael Winter frequently ran into trouble over the autobiographical quality of his fiction, which was filled with thinly veiled portraits of incidents involving family and friends. As Winter has mentioned in a number of interviews, those around him became acutely aware of, and sometimes strenuously objected to, his professional eavesdropping. Well, it seems that old habits die hard, because Winter’s latest novel, The Death of Donna Whalen, while taking a turn towards the documentary, is in some ways an extended exercise in eavesdropping (for much of the book, quite literally). The novel, which was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers Trust Fiction Prize, revisits the murder of a young woman in St. John’s in the 1990s and consists of statements by and conversations between those involved in the case, including wiretaps of various witnesses and suspects. In his foreword to the novel, Winter describes his initial temptation to write about the murder in the documentary fiction mode of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, but admits that he developed reservations about taking a true story, especially a graphically violent one that had a dramatic impact on so many lives, and capitalizing on "someone’s tragedy for personal gain." After he shelved all his research, however, the voices from the case kept calling to him and ultimately convinced him that the story offered "a wedge into the human condition that was truer and more vivid than what I could fabricate." The result: The Death of Donna Whalen: A Novel.

Because Winter respectfully turns the telling of the story over to those who were involved in the murder and the subsequent trial, the question of how this is a novel is a good one, and it doesn’t entirely go away. Winter has, though, adapted the raw material of the case in a number of significant ways. The segments of narration and dialogue that constitute the novel have been selected from a much larger body of documents. Winter has "changed the names and locations and merged similar characters," and perhaps most importantly he has "dramatized scenes by converting testimony into the third person." Winter also imparts to the novel a certain narrative arc by dividing his tapestry of voices into four main sections reflecting the evolution of the case. Referring in his foreword to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, Winter contends that the case was so riveting because of the variety and subjectivity — even unreliability — of the multitude of voices offering perspectives on what happened: suspects, witnesses, police inspectors, forensic experts, lawyers, the victim’s daughter, and even the victim herself. Indeed, much of the allure of the novel resides in the richness of the personalities involved and the theatricality of the documentary form: that is, we absorb the complexity of the situation and the complexity of the personalities by what they say, what they say of themselves, and what they say of each other. Furthermore, what they say is couched in a lively and often coarse Newfoundland idiom that, while superficially uniform, is cut through with differences of class, age, professional authority, and other factors.

The first section, "Family and Neighbours," introduces the ensemble cast of victims, witnesses, and suspects, in all their uneasy intimacy, at the centre of which is the turbulent relationship between Donna Whalen and her explosive boyfriend, Sheldon Troke. "The Murder" conveys the web of conflicting and often contradictory testimony about events on the night Donna Whalen was found stabbed to death, with a pair of panties twisted around her neck. Despite the dramatic nature of the situation, the story at first is not as gripping as it might sound, because the testimony is at times repetitive and is conveyed without much sense of temporal location beyond the division of the novel into sections. Here an apt comparison is with George Elliott Clarke’s George & Rue, a novel about the brutal killing of a taxi driver in Fredericton in 1949, the latter half of which likewise relies heavily on trial transcripts but is conveyed in a less polyphonic mode and with a clearer narrative arc. As The Death of Donna Whalen moves towards a verdict, however, the novel becomes more absorbing, intense, and complicated. "The Investigation" chronicles the aggressive approach of the police in pursuing the case against Sheldon Troke and their compromising characterization of the Troke family as a threat to public safety. Winter then effectively builds the climax of the novel, "The Jailhouse Informant," around the flamboyant, theatrical, and highly dubious Leander Dollymont. Winter decided to take a hands-off approach to the novel, in part because he felt he couldn’t improve on the vividness of the language of the documents and the personalities involved, and in "Dolly," whose testimony played a big role in the case against Sheldon Troke, Winter clearly recognized a real "character."

While Winter hovers on the periphery for most of the story, he ends the book with an epilogue imparting the outcome of the case and reflecting on its implications. The Death of Donna Whalen is a story about the very human complexities that influence how justice unfolds, and Winter’s documentary approach allows for its unfolding without prejudgement, forcing us to assess the evidence and adjudicate the conflicting, even self-contradictory, voices as we go. Winter thus avoids predetermining the outcome and, more importantly, offers insight into how the pursuit of justice is complicated by fear, prior reputation, presupposition of guilt, self-protection, and the sometimes understandable, sometimes overzealous concern of authorities to protect the community from further harm.

For those familiar with Winter’s work, this is a very different Michael Winter book, and readers looking for his trademark style — the supple lines, the offbeat characters, the vivid, idiosyncratic imagery — are going to be somewhat (but not entirely) disappointed. But like Winter’s faux memoir This All Happened, and like his innovative variation on the historical novel, The Big Why, The Death of Donna Whalen shows Winter to be a writer willing to take some interesting risks, once again rewarding his readers as a result.