Jeffrey Round’s sixth novel can’t quite decide what it wants to be. It is alternately a lyrical evocation of one of Ontario’s strangest phenomena, Prince Edward County’s elevated lake, which never runs dry despite lacking a source; a murder mystery set amid the upper crust, with family secrets stretching back two decades; a few days in the life of an intrepid missing-persons investigator struggling to raise his son in a tough Toronto environment; and a romantic melodrama involving several men who can’t figure out how to commit to each other.

Many of those story elements, taken separately, feature strong writing, especially about Toronto neighbourhoods. “The old Canadians knew they lived in a ghetto at the bottom of Leslieville that held gold for a few, but fool’s gold for most,” Round writes. The characters are vividly drawn – especially protagonist Dan Sharp, who looks for missing people as a means of grappling with an uncertain present and a “lurid past” (as his ne’er-do-well boyfriend terms it). Sharp and his teenaged son, Kedrick, are characters whose company readers will enjoy despite the darkness that infuses the novel.

But the book suffers from being overstuffed. Pages upon pages of backstory about Dan’s tough beginnings in small-town Ontario, which he fled for the streets of the big city, could have been excised. The murder mystery doesn’t begin until close to a third of the way through, and once it does kick in, lively banter is undercut by needless exposition. Overall, the book reads as if Round felt compelled to cram everything about Sharp and contemporary Toronto into one volume. Such comprehensiveness is unnecessary. Sharp’s a sleuth I want to see more of, so long as his creator can allow him to relax into his role a bit.