Shocking tale of the local crook killed by his victims

Blood In The Water Silver Donald Cameron Swift Press €17.99 ★★★★★

When not in prison, Phillip Boudreau spent his days tormenting the fishing community of Petit de Grat in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.

He was a trickster, a ‘rustic Robin Hood’, an agent of chaos whose nefarious exploits included poaching lobsters, stealing neighbours’ cars for joyrides, and vandalising fishing boats and gear.

Each winter, Boudreau would deliberately get caught by the police during some robbery or other so he could spend the colder nights in a warm bed, with the certainty of three meals a day. ‘He didn’t fall between the cracks,’ it was said of Boudreau, ‘he lived in the cracks.’

Hostility towards him continued to spread among the residents of Petit de Grat over years, until he was at last murdered on a warm June day in 2013 by three ‘highly respected local fishermen’, who had finally snapped after Boudreau cut their lobster traps that morning.

It is this tension that the Canadian journalist and author Silver Donald Cameron, pictured, who died in May 2020, wanted to investigate: ‘How the criminal became a victim while the victims became criminals.’ Blood In

The Water is the result of his meticulous documentation of the goings-on in the court case against the three fishermen, fleshed out by a multitude of interviews he conducted with those who knew Boudreau.

Cameron’s writing is precise and wellresearched. The murder provides him with the opportunity to reflect more widely on the legal system and the manner in which law is vernacularised by particular communities.

He draws upon the Acadian history of Cape Breton Island to show why those in Petit de Grat ‘don’t like to call the cops’, and act out of a shared understanding of what is right, rather than keeping to a moral code enshrined in law.

Acadia was a former colony of New France in north-eastern North America, the majority of whose people were expelled in the 18th Century for failing to submit to British rule.

Though the region no longer exists, the former Acadian communities are still suspicious of the authorities and consider themselves a distinct nation.

While the Acadia chapter is illuminating, the level of detail can be detrimental to the narrative’s momentum.

While the book is unlikely to reach the cult status of In Cold Blood, of which its author Truman Capote suggested his method was to treat ‘a real event with fictional techniques’, Cameron has achieved his intention in producing a comprehensive, thoughtful examination of a case wherein ‘the root causes of the tragedy include a systematic failure of the legal system itself ’.