Roar Back

Confession: when it comes to this series, I have not been a faithful reader *hangs head*. But I’ve been picking away at it & just recently finished “Ball Park” which I really enjoyed. So when this came along, I grabbed it. I could probably sum up the babbling that follows with 2 words. Loved it. But then I’ve never been known for my editing skills 😉.

The book opens with an uncomfortable scene from 1958. A young cop is put through a hazing ritual to prepare him for going undercover to infiltrate the mob in Montréal. It’s a long term assignment…years. And if accepted, he no longer exists. He will become known as Coalface.

It’s now 1978 & cop Émile Cinq-Mars has just been promoted to Sergeant Detective. So it’s only fitting that with his new rank comes a new case. Someone has broken into an apartment building. Seventeen times. Yep, 17 flats & 11 storage sheds were robbed. While he admires the thief’s work ethic, the location strikes Émile as an odd choice. This is a poor area, it’s not like the tenants were rolling in flat screens & jewels. But in one of the apartments, something was left behind.

In alternate chapters we follow a man who’s been undercover for 20 years. He’s had a hard life & is no longer sure he can distinguish himself from the Italians, Russians & Hell’s Angels he mixes with. If there’s one lesson he’s learned it’s that you don’t have to be dead to lose your life.

Émile & his partner are trying to get their heads around the robbery when his old boss gets in touch. Captain Armand Touton is a legend on the force & was Émile’s mentor when he worked night patrol. Although retired, Touton is still connected & has a job for his former protégé. He’s been contacted by a man known as Coalface with an urgent message. There’s a war coming between rival gangs & he has a request. After filling Émile in on the past, Touton makes it clear he’s passing the baton. Deal with it.

Buckle up, people. To quote Dr. Seuss, oh the places you’ll go. This is a dark, noirish mind bender of a story with an intriguing cast. On the surface it’s your basic cops vs. criminals but the characters & prose make it so much more. You’re dragged into a world full of secrets, violence & shifting alliances. And that’s just the police department. At times, there’s more honour & loyalty to be found among the so called “bad guys” but the downside is they tend to have a shorter life span.

The plotting is first rate but what puts it over the top are the characters. They’re diverse & so well depicted you can almost hear them breathing. Just be careful who you care about….they can be driving the story on one page & gone the next. Standouts for me include Émile’s partner Henri Casgrain, the smart & compassionate Reverend Alex Montour & hilarious neighbour-from-hell “The Bombardier”. And, of course, Émile.

If forced to pick one reason I keep coming back to the series, it would be this character. He’s a complex & compelling guy who is the beating heart of each book. Émile’s path to the police force was not a straight line. Initially he studied to be a priest until he had doubts about his calling. Then he turned toward becoming a veterinarian but that didn’t pan out either. However he has no regrets as those experiences proved valuable once he became a cop. Now he gets to hear confessions and deal with animals on a regular basis.

Émile is a thinker, a quiet & solitary man who often sees what others miss. His vocabulary & dust-dry humour frequently sail over the heads of colleagues. But not Henri Casgrain. For me, their relationship & dialogue was one of the highlights of the story.

If I had to give this book a label I’d call it a literary police procedural. From descriptions of the characters & their inner conflicts to the richly atmospheric setting, you become completely immersed in this fictional world. The plot is intricate, intelligent & sprinkled with dry, gallows humour (is it wrong that I was grinning during a funeral scene?). But it also reflects the brutal reality of the relationship between poverty & organized crime in a big city.

I’m a bit stingy when it comes to handing out 5 stars. It’s reserved for books that make me oblivious to my surroundings & completely engrossed in the story. This did that in spades & so just like that, I’ve got my first contender for the Top Ten of 2020.

This is my first taste of John Farrow's Sergeant Detective Emile Cinq-Mars series set in Montreal, an unusual protagonist, having trained as a priest, a vocation he dropped because he felt celibacy was not for him, tried being a vet which also disagreed, only to settle for being a conflicted cop, a role that fits him like a glove and which he excels at. Bemoaning his current state of unplanned celibacy, stillness serves him better when it comes to thinking, rather than a hectic environment or any fuss, preferring guile to violence, he has a reputation for oddball intuitive thinking. It is 1978, Emile has only just been promoted to Sergeant, his first task is to attend to the strange multiple burglaries, 17 apartments and 11 storage sheds, at a poor apartment block of resident crazies. His first thought is that this is preparation for some bigger crime, the toaster heist doesn't make much sense, but he is forced to rethink when he finds the body of a murdered man in the closet of a resident's apartment.

Emile's night police patrol mentor and reformer boss, Captain Armand Touton, now retired, gets in touch about an undercover agent embedded in the local mafia since 1958, nicknamed Coalface. Having barely had any contact with Coalface for the last 20 years, Touton has now been asked to ensure the denial of early release of a minor league punk, Johnny Bondar, from the Vincent de Paul penitentiary to prevent all out gang warfare in the city. Touton passes the task to Emile, who fails to persuade Reverend Alex Montour to stop supporting Bondar's parole. Emile has no liking for convulated criminal plots and organised carnage, but this is what he has on his hands as Montreal threatens to slip into a deadly and brutal war between the Mob, the Biker Gangs, and the Russians and Eastern Europeans who want to muscle into their territory.

Emile, facing threats from within the police and the criminal fraternity, needs a partner he can trust and ensures that he gets the night patrol's Detective Henri Casgrain. Casgrain, with his congenital stoop, is convivial and intelligent, and unusually he has the smarts to get Emile , by the end of the case he returns to his previous post, but I would love to see him continue to partner Emile in the future, the pair work so well together. Farrow has created a fascinating central protagonist in Emile, serving in a police force where corruption is rife, where having been a priest surprisingly turns out to help him considerably in his role as a cop. This is complex and intricately plotted dark storytelling, and a noir crime series which I thoroughly enjoyed becoming acquainted with. Highly recommended. Many thanks to Severn House for an ARC.