According to its cover, Displaced Persons is based on a true story. For the uninitiated it’s difficult to tell where fact and fiction diverge. The novel’s narrator, a woman named Alex Cooper, is a writer who grew up and went to university in Thunder Bay, Ontario, like Margie Taylor. Taylor uses letters and diary entries that feel like real artifacts, and the death at the core of the book surely happened.

Alex returns to Thunder Bay after a long absence on a quest to write about the suspicious suicide of Tina van Buren, an old friend from student days. Though Tina has been dead since the late 1970s, the trail is by no means cold. Alex tracks down many people still haunted by Tina’s last days. But why does Alex care, and why now? Because Tina was a free spirit, she says, “just out there on her own path” – as Alex evidently feels she never was. Now in middle age she is struggling with an empty nest, an absentee husband, a brief affair, and at the end of a 15-year stint as a columnist.

Taylor provides some fine, focused writing. An episode in which Alex blunders out into a blizzard after her dog is particularly vivid. Yet the book is puzzlingly circumspect about Alex’s early life, beyond passing references to her father and sister, and her mother’s death from MS. What, we wonder, did Alex’s father think of the menage à trois Alex set up in his basement?

The final chapter leaves the reader impatient that so little, really, has become clear. Ultimately it doesn’t matter whether Tina’s sad death was murder or suicide – it was the inevitable result of a self-destructive lifestyle. And just as Tina’s death is still enshrouded in murkiness, so Alex has a distance to go before finding how she lost her way.