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.

By John Farrow
ISBN: 9781250057686
Publisher: St Martin's Press
Publication Date: 5/26/2015
Format: Hardcover
My Rating: 4 Stars

A special thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

THE STORM MURDERS by John Farrow is a suspenseful crime thriller mixed with tons of wit. Loving this so called “retired” Emile Cinq-Mars, Montreal police detective, who cannot seem to stay in the senior zone, or away from trouble, even in the US.

Emile is called out of retirement as the FBI wants someone on the ground in Canada after a murder of a married couple at an isolated Quebec farmhouse, during a severe storm.

When several murders began occurring around the US, in the aftermath of a natural disaster, the FBI wants to bump up the investigation especially after the last one when two cops on the scene were gunned down.

A hurricane—Katrina in New Orleans, a tornado in Alabama, a North Dakota flood, and California, a small earthquake with mild property damage. In the aftermath, a killer strikes. So is this individual traveling to disaster zones to perpetuate his crimes? So possibly the killer got impatient waiting for a disaster, and settled for a local storm, which could mean he was nearby—a Quebecois?

Cinq-Mars does not suffer from any lack of activity and contrary to his prior speculations he hardly missed his job. His wife did not want him to get killed on the job, so she was the guiding principal behind his retirement. The former Montreal city detective weighed more than his wife’s concerns about his imminent and violent death before choosing to retire.

Emile, a religious man and his younger wife, Sandra who has a horse business, decide to mix a little business with pleasure and take off to New Orleans, as a background investigation to see what all the cases may tell him or if they are connected in some way. After all it is just a consult, so how dangerous could it be? (this part was so much fun)

They rarely traveled, with the horses, unless it was a week in New Hampshire where her mother resided or horse fairs and competitions or an occasional trip to Florida and the islands. However, now New Orleans, where they hoped to find the city in revival mode after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, but really did not know what to expect and hopefully would have some downtime to enjoy one another for some casual fun.

The murderers seem to be methodical and precise. Calculated, and more professional than normal. The victims seem to have died early and were spared any prolonged physical or psychological agony. Each victim loses his or her finger, and the rings on it, but in Alabama the medical examiner declared positively that the fingers were removed postmortem. So they did not suffer. From Louisiana, to Connecticut depended on the ME. How are these victims targeted? A serial killer? A copy cat? Does the killer hate cops as is he trying to outsmart them?

However, when the couple arrive in NOLA, they no more than check in to their hotel, The Hilton Garden Inn, when strange things begin happening, from robbery, a break-in, an abduction, and then demands. The abduction occurred when the local authorities took him out drinking and on the town--he knows all too well about investigations being corrupt. Where is his wife? With all this action, Emile is back in the game and is questioning the Big Easy’s finest, the FBI, and the hotel staff about his wife’s whereabouts. When Cinq-Mars hears the words, Danziger Bridge from the kidnappers, he is feeling anything but southern hospitality, and someone wants him out of this state.

With the shock of their misadventure lingering, they could not wait to return home, to some peace, even with more snow than when they left. He hopes he is off the case, and not interested in any more drama, as after all he is retired and does not need the garbage; until he decides he may want to after all. It may be too good to pass up, when the next of the storm murders occur in Alabama, and back to Quebec where the intensity and danger heats up, focused on Emile and Sandra.

This was my first book by Canadian writer, John Farrow(pen name of Trevor Ferguson), and really enjoyed his well-developed characters, especially Cinq-Mars, and Sandra (and her mouth); loved the author’s style with a perfect mix of wit, corruption, money laundering, mystery, crime, and suspense.Look forward to reading more of this series!

Note: A new trilogy of John Farrow crime novels, The Storm Murders, has been sold to Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press in New York and will appear under the Minotaur imprint. The first comes out in May, 2015, under the same name, "The Storm Murders." The second. "Seven Days Dead" follows in 2016, and the third, "The Talisman Quarry," will come out in the same year or in 2017. More crime novels are to follow the trilogy