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Roar Back
Roar Back
Roar Back
Ebook384 pages8 hours

Roar Back

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"Remarkable stuff. Fans of Bill James' Harpur and Iles saga of cops and robbers are in for quite a treat" - Kirkus Reviews Starred Review

Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars fails with a task set to him by his former captain and the consequences look set to spark a gangland war in Montreal.

Montreal, 1978. Newly promoted Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars attends the scene of seventeen break-ins at an apartment complex. Nothing more than stolen toasters. Cinq-Mars suspects that the burglaries are a trial run for a bigger heist . . . until he discovers a body pinned to a wall with a machete in one apartment.

When the former captain of Night Patrol, Armand Touton, receives a tip from an undercover informant in the Mafia, Cinq-Mars is ordered to intervene with a prisoner's release: the man must stay behind bars. He fails with the task and the immediate consequences are devastating.

While trying to remedy his failure, solve the mystery of the break-ins and the case of the dead body, a chilling aspect emerges . . . gangland Montreal is bracing for war.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 1, 2020
ISBN9781448303854
Author

John Farrow

JOHN FARROW is the pen name of Trevor Ferguson, who has written nine novels and four plays and has been named Canada’s best novelist in both Books in Canada and the Toronto Star. Under the name John Farrow, he has written two other novels featuring Émile Cinq-Mars, City of Ice and Ice Lake. He was raised in Montreal and lives in Hudson, Quebec.

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Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Emile Cinq-Mars series continues to be perhaps the best ever written. It boils down to a number of things. Cinq-Mars is endlessly interesting, and as Farrow has taken his narratives back to the detective's early career, we can see how he became so formidable in the first two books in the series. The novels set in past times also include Armand Touton, Cinq-Mars' legendary mentor, who is equally fascinating. In this book's timeframe, Touton is retired, but still remains the link to a mole hidden deep within Montreal's Mafia. Bent on a cosmic level of revenge, the mole's actions drive the story and give Cinq-Mars another difficult puzzle to solve, which begins with a coordinated series of break-ins where the main items stolen are toasters. Farrow weaves this and several other threads into a tight knot that it takes Cinq-Mars, Touton, and Cinq-Mars latest partner to untangle. As usual, the Montreal settings are well-drawn. Anyone who knows the city will be following the story in their heads and visualizing the locations. Farrow doesn't write regular mysteries. Despite the large amount of plot, the story remains character-driven, and the author's descriptions of the characters thoughts in this multiple viewpoint narrative always ring true. My fingers are crossed that Farrow is at work on the next Cinq-Mars book right now.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A fascinating read with more twists than a pretzel!What is it about Canadian French noir? Possibly that gritty, understated humor, or the 'no holds barred' exposé of the underbelly of 1978 Québécois Montreal, the rivalry of gangs--the Italian Mafiosa, The Biker Gangs, and the newer guys on the block, the Russians/ Eastern bloc coteries. Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars enters a new phase of his career, and courtesy of his old boss Armand Touton, he's at the pointy end of a problem that will spread into the gang situation.Touton wants him to lookout for a deeply embedded agent in the gang arena. Coalface, as Touton dubbed the mole, has been there for over twenty years. A situation that's been on total blackout and unknown to all except for Touton, and now Émile. Now that Touton has retired how and whom does Coalface contact if needed?A call out to a simple robbery leads to some dangerous places, including the mole's apartment block. Things take a darker when the stolen toasters call out is upgraded to murder with the discovery of a body in a closet. More bodies, police corruption, and internal gang wrangles erupt with international overtones.What can I say? I was totally involved, totally present and cynically sold on the politics of it all in this 'in your face' read.A Severn House ARC via NetGalley

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Roar Back - John Farrow

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