When Loretta Colton moved north to work as a prosecutor in the Northwest Territories, she had no way of knowing that the experience would eventually send her back to Yellowknife as a novelist. But on Saturday, October 17, 2026, she'll return to the city that shaped her fiction, appearing at the Yellowknife Public Library for a brief talk and book signing from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
The event is free and open to the public, and it centers on her debut novel, What the Aurora Remembers: A Nicky Ryan Mystery, published by Minotaur and released on July 9, 2026. It is the first book in a planned series, and it arrives with an unusually strong endorsement for a first-time author: Kirkus Reviews called it "a writer to watch" and praised its "well-paced plot, which reads more like a police procedural than a mystery."
The novel's premise draws directly on Colton's professional life. Nicky Ryan is a rookie police officer in the fictional Northwest Territories community of Fort Gabriel, six months into the job, when she is handed her first homicide investigation. A teenage girl named Alison has been maimed in a knife attack, her mother is dead, and her father is the prime suspect. The story follows both Nicky's investigation and Alison's recovery, which takes her to Yellowknife to live with her aunt — a detail that gives the book its local resonance. Alison, an outsider in more ways than one, finds refuge in the faith and practices of Islam, a turn that the novel treats as a source of genuine complexity rather than easy resolution.
Colton's biography explains why the setting feels so lived-in. She spent thirty years as a lawyer with Canada's Department of Justice, including nine years living and working as a prosecutor in the Northwest Territories, followed by two decades in Ottawa focused on criminal law, federal policing, and national security law. She now lives in Ottawa and is at work on a second Nicky Ryan book, which will move the series into the world of national security policing.
The novel does not flinch from the harder questions that come with its subject matter. Kirkus noted that it "deftly explores issues that evoke big feelings, such as homophobia, alcohol use disorder in Indigenous communities, suicidal ideation," and the book's central tension is whether the grinding machinery of the criminal justice system can deliver anything that resembles justice for a tight-knit Indigenous community that has learned to distrust white police officers from "down south." Nicky, who is white, female, and the lesbian rookie on her RCMP team, is forced to confront the gap between the ideal of justice she joined the force to serve and its messy reality.
That the author is bringing this story to the Yellowknife Public Library has a certain symmetry. The library, located on the second floor of Centre Square Mall at 5022 49th Street, sits in the city where part of the novel unfolds — and where Colton herself once worked. The event is one stop on a short northern tour: she is scheduled to appear at Yellowknife Books on 49th Street the afternoon before, on Friday, October 16, and then to head to Calgary for Bouchercon, the annual mystery fan convention, from October 21 to 25.
For readers in a city that knows its aurora intimately, the title carries a double meaning — the northern lights as both a literal feature of the landscape and a metaphor for what a place holds onto, and what it would rather forget. Colton's talk promises to unpack some of that, drawing on nine years of northern experience that few crime writers can claim. It's a rare chance to hear a debut novelist discuss a book rooted in this specific place, in a venue that anyone can simply walk into.