In the preface to Night Justice, Peter Edwards admits that although he grew up in “Donnelly country” in London, Ontario, all he knew about the notorious Irish-Canadian family was that they had been murdered by their neighbours in the late 19th century, that academic historians had extensively studied the Donnellys’ lives and untimely demise, and that the family had been accused of cutting the tails off horses. This is a good admission to make up front, since it mirrors the extent of most Canadians’ knowledge of the Black Donnellys.

Night Justice should go some way to expanding that cursory knowledge, even for readers more familiar with the details of the story. Edwards, a longtime reporter for the Toronto Star and the author of One Dead Indian, has mined an exhaustive list of primary and secondary sources to flesh out the Donnellys’ story in vivid detail. Making use of court transcripts and other firsthand archives, Edwards describes the fateful night in 1880 when five Donnellys were killed by a mob of neighbours, spurred on by a local priest and headed by a local police constable. (With neighbours like that, who needs enemies?)

For anyone interested in the Donnelly case, there are two main questions worth asking. First, why did the villagers of Lucan hate this family so much that they decided to kill them? And second, how did they do it? Edwards has
tackled both of these questions, combining a present-tense narrative with hard historical material, including excerpts from letters and newspaper articles. He also adds bits of dialogue to keep the story vivid and moving along at a brisk pace. Throughout the book he keeps the focus not only on the Donnellys, but on key members of Ontario’s political and legal class, in an effort to figure out how this “night justice” played out beyond the village of Lucan.

Anyone who wants to know more about the Donnelly story would do well to read this book. The mass murder is one of those episodes in Canadian history that deserves to be better understood, and Edwards has done an excellent job of increasing that understanding.