In Dakota Hamilton’s first novel, Freedom’s Just Another Word, Maggie Hoffer is accused of murdering her husband and awaits trial in a maximum security jail. Her husband was hotter for his Harley than for Maggie and the kids, yet she compulsively rereads her domestic role, often finding love between the lines of razor wire. Reading is crucial for Maggie: favourite recipes, Tarot cards, versions of her husband’s death (she claims he shot himself), and her job in the prison library all provide Maggie with comfort and a route to spiritual recovery. By reading her past, she seeks to free her soul and clarify her innocence.

Maggie is offered many versions of spirituality. Hamilton, who volunteers at a Vancouver area prison, has the Tarot vie with Christianity, West Coast native lore, biker creed, and 12-step programs, each doctrine contributing wise words for Maggie and the women she befriends in jail. Lesbian, native, black, and Chinese cons; a been-there guy counsellor; the cliché evil bitch guard; all are familiar characters from the literature of prison, but Hamilton knows her craft, takes her time, and makes them foul and fecund.

With advance praise for the book coming from W.P. Kinsella, the native stuff – medicine wheel, animal guides, healing rituals – best be read with suspended intellectual engagement. An idea such as, “Freedom shape-shifts. It starts out looking like one thing and then it changes later on and looks like something else,” is one of the many reductive echoes of First Nations culture. But such attempts at depth should be ignored. Read, instead, for the power of the relationship between Maggie and her husband, or for the tight control Hamilton has over their story, or for the surprising tenderness with which Maggie details her life as a drug smuggler’s lonely wife.

Do not, however, anticipate an ending. Forgiveable in a first novel this likable are late complications and a lack of resolution. For that, the book will need a sequel; it shouldn’t. Maggie deserves one, though. She has stories to tell about hard time in jail and its household counterpart – imprisonment in a marriage. As mystery, comedy, and romance, the novel is a ride on the back of a Harley on a sunny afternoon: fast and fun.