It’s difficult at first to decide why Richard Teleky’s Pack Up the Moon isn’t as good as it should be. The writing is spare and elegant, the plot plausible, the details evocative. There are some lovely turns of phrase: “Despite her apparent calm, I felt her restlessness like an unsettling quiet in the middle of the night.”

The problem lies in the novel’s characters. If you were seated next to one of them at a dinner party, you’d probably start wondering if it were possible to drown yourself when the soup course arrives. Relentlessly pompous and self-absorbed, they are all 50ish, discontented, and deeply irritating. (They are wont to quote dialogue from old films and kiss on both cheeks.)

The story starts with Karl, returning to Toronto for the funeral of Jay, an ex-lover. There, he meets up with old friends Leila, whose seven-year-old son just died, and Mark, who – well, we don’t know why Mark is so morose. As they reminisce, Karl finds out that Charlotte, his estranged best friend, was murdered in a Florida motel over 20 years ago. From there, the story flashes between the past, when Charlotte and Karl were developing the fraught friendship of a gay man and a straight woman, and the present, when Karl goes to Sarasota to retrace the last weeks of Charlotte’s life.

Pack Up the Moon is not a murder mystery – the police know whodunit. But Karl’s investigation into the murder seems to help him get some closure in a life that’s already tightly buttoned down. In the end, Leila puts it best: “The years are all there, but they don’t exactly add up to a life.” Teleky is a fine writer – his first novel, The Paris Years of Rosie Kamin, justifiably garnered hot reviews – but this effort doesn’t add up to much.