It is January in the northern Ontario town of Algonquin Bay, and the foul smell of murder permeates the chilly air when the remains of a bear's dinner in the woods turns out to be the body of an American tourist with a shadowy past. Time for Detective John Cardinal to track down the scent. The mystery deepens when another corpse, that of local doctor Winter Cates, is discovered in the same woods, and Cardinal suspects a link. Unearthing the connection takes Cardinal back to a very different time and place: Montreal circa 1970, a city gripped by the fear of separatist violence. A single incident from that era turns out to have deadly repercussions in Algonquin Bay 30 years later.