Craig Terlson’s crime thriller, Correction Line, underscores how badly off track people can become if they just keep doing what they’re doing. Surveyors learned this in a late-1800s project to survey the vast prairies of Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba and divide them into equal sections. They soon realized the longitudinal (north-south) meridians they established would converge as they reached higher latitudes, so that truly square sections would be impossible to achieve. They needed correction lines.
Just as the survey’s meridian lines met at a single point, the characters in Terlson’s story converge on a destructive human nexus named Dave. Like a black hole, he draws people and their energy to him. Being involved with Dave is extremely risky business. His career has gone from bringing in liquor, to marijuana, to hard drugs, to human trafficking. Dave doesn’t appear all that much in the story, yet he is everywhere in it. He’s the motivating force behind almost everything Terlson’s fascinating cast of characters does.
Terlson uses the wide open prairie of western Canada to great effect, as the characters range over its empty spaces in their pickup trucks and old Dodges and Pontiacs. Much of the novel is set several decades ago, and the gas-guzzlers cruise the surveyors’ grid and take the gentle curves—the correction lines—that adjust the strict geometry. He describes the stunning sunrises, the farm fields and grasslands that stretch to the horizon, and the lonely dwellings. When it seems you can see forever, the sky becomes more present. Terlson’s descriptions are more than painting pretty pictures. You need this solid grounding in the familiar, because what the characters are up to will stretch your perspective.
A young woman named Lucy has a past relationship with Dave, but she’s disappeared. Now he has cancer, and he wants her back. Alive. Lucy’s late mother made a strange potion he thinks will cure him, and Lucy makes something similar, but does it work? Dave puts his best man, Lawrence, on the job, and Lawrence recruits the rootless Curtis to help him search.
Whether she can replicate her mother’s strange mixture or not, her real talent is precognition. Maybe she doesn’t know exactly what bad thing is going to happen, but she knows something bad is heading her way. And it isn’t Roy, the failing door-to-door encyclopedia salesman who’s taken up with her.
Roy is a good guy in way over his head, with the opportunity to do something worthwhile for a change. He also has a sixth sense when trouble is brewing. Of course, this realization isn’t much of a stretch, when violent armed men are lurking about. Houses get destroyed. Cars, even big ones, don’t have a chance. Hospitals are visited. Much of the drama plays out along the roads surrounded by those endless fields, and, as you gradually get to know these dodgy characters, you come to like most of them too. You may yearn for their travels to make the slight angle of correction that would bend their lives in new directions—somewhere Dave is not.