Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Tom Thomson was Canada's Vincent van Gogh. He painted for a period of five years before meeting his untimely death in a remote wilderness lake in July 1917. He was buried in an unofficial grave close to the lake where his body was found. About eight hours after he was buried, the coroner arrived but never examined the body and ruled his death accidental due to drowning. A day and a half later, Thomson's family hired an undertaker to exhume the body and move it to the family plot about 100 miles away. This undertaker refused all help, and only worked at night.

In 1956, John Little's father and three other men, influenced by the story of an old park ranger who never believed Thomson's body was moved by the undertaker, dug up what was supposed to be the original, empty grave. To their surprise, the grave still contained a body, and the skull revealed a head wound that matched the same location noted by the men who pulled his corpse from the water in 1917. The finding sent shockwaves across the nation and began a mystery that continues to this day.

In Who Killed Tom Thomson? John Little continues the sixty-year relationship his family has had with Tom Thomson and his fate by teaming up with two high-ranking Ontario provincial police homicide detectives. For the first time, they provide a forensic scientific opinion as to how Thomson met his death, and where his body is buried. Little draws upon his father's research, plus recently released archival material, as well as his own thirty-year investigation. He and his colleagues prove that Thomson was murdered, and set forth two persons of interest who may have killed Tom Thomson.

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My Review: Wondering who Tom Thomson was?

The Jack Pine, Winter 1916-1917

He was a founding member, if a posthumous one, of The Group of Seven Canadian artists. It is not too much to say that Thomson's untimely, and long mysterious, death was a major catalyst in the Group of Seven (then called "the Algonquin School") emerging from obscurity to claim a place in the world artistic establishment.

That does rather make solving the mystery surrounding Thomson's death problematic. Especially for the family, who (via eldest sibling George Thomson) visited the area where Tom's body was discovered and spoke to his contacts there; as well as the letters Tom had sent home, we can feel sure that George felt clear in his mind about what Tom's death involved. And he forcefully, from the day he got there to the day he died, shut down speculation about "what really happened." The Official Story, however, made not one whit of sense. The author, son of a man whose involvement in the case began accidentally almost forty years after Thomson's death, tells a thoroughly researched and forensically vetted story about the death that, had the family not refused to cooperate with a routine exhumation and DNA test, would've made the world's headline machine whir into life.

I think, having read this tendentious tome, that the author and his trained detectives and forensic experts are correct about the outlines of the case, and probably have the final solution covered in their several options as detailed in the book. So it seems like a safe bet that someone in Thomson's remaining family already knows what the truth is and doesn't want it told, OR doesn't want the mysterious cachet that adheres to Tom Thomson's name and thus his work (and their patrimony) to be even slightly dispelled. ( )