From the first chilling sentence, “My past is a shallow grave,” Peter Hogg’s debut novel, Crimes of War, is a riveting read – at times funny, at times harrowing. Hogg, a criminal prosecutor in Vancouver, won the first Chapters/Robertson Davies Prize for his manuscript, which was chosen out of almost 600 entries. The prize for the winning entry was having the book published by McClelland & Stewart.

Told in two voices, the story alternates between the killing fields of the Holocaust and the bureaucratic insanity of Ottawa. Friedrich Reile is a war criminal living out a comfortable old age in Winnipeg. Reile relates his suffering as a German boy under Russian occupation before the war; his enlistment into a German killing unit in 1941; his actions as a mass murderer; and his later life in Canada. Hogg avoids the pitfall of portraying Reile as a monster, rather showing him as a human being who does monstrous things. This is a glimpse into how thousands of people became the executioners of the Third Reich.

The other voice in the story belongs to Dennis Connor, a historian working in Ottawa for the Special Prosecutions Unit (SPU), which is charged with finding and bringing to trial war criminals hiding in Canada. Struggling with bureaucracy and the impossibility of finding witnesses after almost half a century, Connor ends up overseeing the shutdown of the unit. However, he knows Reile is guilty and determines to do something. Being a decent man, all that he can manage is minor harassment and a small act of vandalism.

Hogg’s writing is vivid and leaps startlingly from humorous Ottawa chit-chat to the gas vans of the Einsatzgruppen (killing squads). The author was a member of the SPU and has used his experiences to create an extraordinary historical fiction that leaves many unsettling questions in the reader’s mind long after the last page is turned.