The title alone is a good indicator that in this new Arthur Beauchamp novel, William Deverell’s lovably irascible lawyer protagonist will find himself in unfamiliar territory. “Ottawa was his unhappy home away from home since his beloved wife won a federal by-election thirty months ago” as the country’s lone Green Party MP. As Arthur pines for his beloved farm on Garibaldi Island and chafes in the shadow cast by his wife’s new celebrity, his unlikely rescue comes in the form of a high school teacher once suspected of terrorism in the fictional former Soviet republic of Bhashyistan, and who faces new charges after a plane full of delegates blows up.

Deverell spins a wild tale full of biting satire about Canadian political machinery, the tactics, covert or otherwise, employed by CSIS, and the problem of renting out one’s West Coast home to convicted eco-terrorists. Deverell’s imagination gets high marks for postulating what happens when an obscure country declares war on Canada, and his descriptions slice with the precision of a razor. Case in point: a Bhashyistan baddie named Nikolai Globbo has the title of “assistant deputy director of political corrections” – i.e., the country’s former “head torturer.” Arthur reflects on his years in Vancouver courtrooms as being “hidden behind an impenetrable fog of gin fumes and day-long hangovers.”

Imagination and clever turns of phrase, alas, do not a great crime novel make. Too often Deverell sacrifices plot cohesion in favour of imaginative tricks that provoke laughs, but leave the reader puzzled. By the time Snow Job reaches its genuinely surprising ending, it’s too late to compensate for the exhausting reading experience.