Perish the Day

Starred review from March 20, 2017
The excellent final volume in Farrow’s Storm Murders trilogy (after 2016’s Seven Days Dead) takes retired Montreal detective Émile Cinq-Mars and his wife, Sandra, to New Hampshire to visit her dying mother. The couple also plan to attend the graduation of Sandra’s niece Caroline from the Dowbiggin School of International Studies. But tragedy intervenes with the murder of one of Caroline’s friends, Addie Langford, whose body is found posed on the stairs inside a campus clock tower. The killer redressed his victim, applied makeup postmortem, and adorned the corpse with a necklace. The family connection to Addie leads Sandra to encourage Émile to play a part in solving the crime, despite intense opposition to his involvement from the state trooper overseeing the inquiry. The case is complicated by two other murders, which appear connected. John Verdon fans will be pleased by Farrow’s pitting of his well-rounded lead against a puzzle worthy of the detective’s acuity. Agents: Carolyn Forde and Bruce Westwood, Westwood Creative Artists (Canada).

March 15, 2017
Canadian novelist Trevor Ferguson's sixth pseudonymous outing packs retired Montreal police detective Emile Cinq-Mars and his wife, Sandra, off to Holyoake, New Hampshire, where their plans to attend their niece Caroline's graduation and Sandra's dying mother are swiftly upstaged by a homicide spree.Addie Langford, an international finance student at the Dowbiggin School of International Studies, which sits yearningly in the shadow of Dartmouth, has been so beautifully dressed and so carefully arranged on the stairs leading to the Dowbiggin clock tower that it's hard to believe she was first raped, then strangled, then raped again. It's even harder to believe that the same deranged lover who murdered her went on to shoot Dowbiggin custodian Malory Earle and her secret lover, professor Philip Lars Toomey, crossing the Vermont state line in the process of creating three separate, and most unequal, crime scenes. Luckily for Chief Alex Till, who's unceremoniously elbowed out of the case by the FBI, Emile (The Storm Murders, 2015, etc.) is on hand to display his unmatched talent for talking himself first onto the bell tower, then further and further into the heart of the investigation. Talking, in fact, is the main thing the visitor from Quebec does, and his detective work, such as it is, is repeatedly upstaged by his fraught, overextended, unfailingly literate conversations with opponents from State Trooper Hammond, who'd love to see him go back home, to the architect of the triple murder, whose feigned astonishment at being accused faithfully echoes that of many readers. -Truth is a bastard,- the motto of Farrow's sage sleuth, couldn't be more accurate this time. The revelations about the Dowbiggin community he ends up unearthing are as sordid as they are wildly implausible.

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May 1, 2017

A series of murders during a fierce rainstorm at a New Hampshire college campus has retired Montreal police officer Emil Cinq-Mars (The Storm Murders; Seven Days Dead) investigating when one of the victims turns out to be a friend of his niece. Farrow is an atmospheric storyteller who offers readers a complex literary mystery.--ACT

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2017
Retired Montreal police detective Emile Cinq-Mars really ought to check the weather forecast before taking a tripthis is the Storm Murders series, after all, so if there's a storm coming to the hero's destination, murder is certain to follow. Sure enough, Cinq-Mars' trip to New Hampshire is timed to a torrential rainstorm, and, inevitably, three murders turn up in the storm's wake, all taking place on a college campus near where Cinq-Mars and his wife, Sandra, are ensconced, awaiting the death of Sandra's mother. Just as inevitably, Cinq-Mars is drawn into the investigation, as one of the victims, a coed, was a friend of his niece. What evolves is a fairly standard academia-set procedural, with Cinq-Mars working uneasily but eventually in tandem with two grumpy but savvy local cops. Farrow once again showcases his hero's sensitivity to subtleties of character, though this time the solution to the elaborate murder scheme appears a bit too suddenly. Still, this is a strong series starring an intellectual investigator and remains the perfect read-alike for Louise Penny's Armand Gamache novels.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)