What does it mean to work for a living when money corresponds only to “the expectations of the people who handle it”? This is the question that drives much of Natalee Caple’s second novel, a taut, poetic thriller that probes notions of power, sexuality, and morality. Set in the Laurentian mountains, the novel tracks friends Sally, Martine, and Isabelle as they establish a successful counterfeiting operation wherein many of the proceeds go to helping women who, like them, have been hurt or abandoned by their male partners. Into their midst lands one of Martine’s many ex-lovers, and Isabelle’s father, the hapless (and archetypically named) Guy.

Guy struggles to find a place for himself within the group, even as Isabelle – a character who’s not only criminal, but “criminally naïve” – attempts herself to construct a role for her father. Martine wrestles with the repercussions of her relative empowerment: sordid criminal involvement and psychological torment. While the three protagonists surrender to the strong undertow of dreams and memories that threaten to drag them apart, another, larger threat brews in the form of gangsters Jules and Jim, veteran killers based in Montreal.

Caple is a unique voice. There is an almost terrifying numinousness to her descriptions of both sex and landscape that heightens the sense of foreboding and inevitability created by the plot. And yet, this is not merely a moody page-turner. Besides creating their own economy, this matriarchy espouses a very alternative way of living; one that Guy, less outlaw than onlooker, can never quite grasp. Eschewing notions of both material possessions and romance, Martine saves her passion for dangerous sex, the fierce and binding love she feels for her daughter, and her commitment to undermining a system she sees as devastatingly unjust.

Indeed, if the structure here tends toward the overly schematic, and the dialogue toward the rhetorical, the ideas underpinning this suspenseful novel are bracing enough to pry it up and out of any generic mould. Add to this Caple’s visceral prose, and Mackerel Sky becomes a story with not only legs, but bone and sinew, blood, and soul.