Montreal novelist Elise Turcotte tells a chilling summer story about teenagers in The Body’s Place. School is out and 15-year-old Hélène, her slightly younger sister Lisa, and their 5-year-old brother have to find things to do during the hot months. They aren’t going on holiday because their parents arrange their schedules so they don’t have time off together. The children are stuck in their suburb next to the river that runs behind the island of Montreal. What to do?

Hélène gets her first job in a garage and has her first relationship with a boy. Lisa stays home with Samuel and writes to her dear friend Florence, who has just moved away. And Samuel swings in the neighbourhood park and wants one story about an owl read over and over again to him. Nothing noteworthy here: it could be the set-up for any number of warmly engaging young adult books.

But Turcotte is telling a story for grown-ups and therefore fills the narrative with chilling menace. A girl about Hélène’s age disappears and is found murdered on an island in the river near their home. Hélène takes Samuel to look at the prison a short walk away. The children’s parents avoid contact with each other, and Hélène can’t imagine how her parents could ever have been close enough to have three children. She also can’t understand where her body is leading her: she knows about sex, she is attracted to boys, but there is neither warmth nor passion in her relations with anyone, with one exception. That is her little brother, for whom her love is both intense and pure.

The novel ends with a tragedy, which is not unexpected given the hints of doom dropped throughout the story. Who dies, however, is something of a surprise, and the reader may be annoyed because the ending seems contrived to underline Turcotte’s chilly vision of life. Sheila Fischman, as always, has done a masterly job of translation.