Roar Back

Starred review from March 1, 2020
Montreal cop �mile Cinq-Mars (Ball Park, 2019, etc.) follows a winding trail from 28 break-ins at an apartment complex to a gang war that could level a lot more than the playing field. After punching holes in the windows of 17 of the apartments and snipping the locks on the storage sheds of 11 more, the thieves helped themselves to all the toasters they could carry. Why take all this trouble on a single night to heist such negligible swag and leave behind a dead man pinned to the inside of a closet with a machete? Before Cinq-Mars, newly promoted to sergeant-detective in 1978, can get much further than asking this question, his retired mentor, Capt. Armand Touton, commands him to persuade the Rev. Alex Montour not to attend the parole hearing to urge the release of car thief Johnny Bondar, who really needs to stay in prison. Montour, a pastor who turns out to be a woman, won't be persuaded; Bondar is duly set loose; and things promptly get weirder and more violent. Soon after Cinq-Mars and Detective Norville "Poof-Poof" Geoffrion, the hapless partner assigned to him, interview Moira Ellibee, a robbery victim who assured them that the man who assaulted her in the process must have been an apparition because she's been under the personal protection of the Blessed Virgin since she was 14, mobster Dominic "The Dime" Letourneau and his mistress du jour are blown to pieces. When Poof-Poof follows Detective Alfred Morin and Sergeant-Detective Jer�me LaF�ret, the homicide detectives who've grabbed the machete murder from them, to Bondar's coming-out party, Bondar is killed along with Poof-Poof. All these crimes are connected, more or less, by the figure of Willy "Coalface" d'Alessandro, a cop whose two decades undercover with the mob have given him a tapestry of loyalties as complicated as his survival instinct is simple. Remarkable stuff. Fans of Bill James' Harpur and Iles saga of cops and robbers are in for quite a treat.

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March 9, 2020
A prologue set in 1958 in a run-down Montreal neighborhood, Park Extension (“the juvenile delinquency capital of Canada”), sets the ominous tone for Farrow’s gripping eighth Émile Cinq-Mars novel (after 2019’s Ball Park). Flash forward to 1978, to Cinq-Mars’s first day on the job with his new rank of sergeant-detective. He’s called to an apartment house in Park Extension to investigate a curious set of burglaries: in one night, 17 of the building’s apartments and 11 storage sheds were broken into, with the thieves taking primarily toasters and coffee makers. In one of the apartments, Cinq-Mars discovers the body of a man “impaled through the neck with what looked like a machete.” Mafia members, Russian gangsters, Hells Angels, and dirty cops thicken the plot as the significance of the prologue, in which the police recruit an unidentified young man for a dangerous undercover mission, gradually becomes clear. Cinq-Mars’s wry, often amusing observations spice up the action. Fans of character-driven police procedurals will be satisfied.