Lady Jail

by John Farrow

Overview

Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars is summoned to Quebec to investigate a murder in this locked-room mystery with a twist: the victim is a criminal, and the suspects are already locked up . . .

Quebec, 1994. Fraud artist Abigail, the newest arrival at the Joliette Institution for Women, is struggling to adjust to the prison's communal quarters. Her fellow inmates only give out the bare bones of their crimes, and it's quite the roll call. Doi took a hatchet to her own daughter. Malka poisoned her husband. And that's just for starters. Abigail keeps her head down, does her best to make friends with the band of killers, tries to survive.

But on an ordinary, quiet day, the extraordinary happens: a prisoner is found face-down in a toilet stall, a strangulation wire around her neck. Trouble, Abigail realises, is ahead.

Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars is summoned from Montreal to investigate. He put Abigail away - and now she's the prime suspect. But other, darker, forces are interested in Abigail, and Emile interferes at his own peril. For as he'll soon discover, in Lady Jail, nothing is as it seems . . .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780727890733
Publisher:	Severn House
Publication date:	02/02/2021
Series:	An mile Cinq-Mars thriller , #9
Edition description:	Main
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	720,146
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 8.98(h) x (d)

About the Author

John Farrow is the pseudonym of Trevor Ferguson, a Canadian novelist and playwright with eight previous novels in the mile Cinq-Mars thriller series and seven literary novels under his own name. Booklist has called the series 'one of the best' in crime fiction. Die Zeit in Germany has called it the best of all time.

Editorial Reviews

12/14/2020

Farrow’s enjoyable ninth Émile Cinq-Mars novel (after 2020’s Roar Back) takes the Montreal detective-sergeant to Quebec’s Joliette Institution for Women (aka Lady Jail), where the inmates live in communal groups, to investigate the garroting murder of Florence, the troublemaker in a group of eight women. Newly arrived prisoner Abigail Lauzon, convicted in an investigation led by Cinq-Mars of embezzling a large sum of money in a fraud case, is the leading suspect. The government wants the unrecovered money in the fraud case back, and pressures Cinq-Mars to threaten Abigail with a life sentence for Florence’s murder unless she reveals where she hid the money. As Cinq-Mars questions the seven surviving women, he finds not all is as it appears, especially regarding each inmate’s crimes and the reason each was chosen for Lady Jail placement. His verbal sparring with Abigail is one of the book’s highlights. Bureaucratic intrigues and complications in Cinq-Mars’s love life enrich the plot. Fans of intelligent police procedurals will be rewarded. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

“Farrow keeps the story’s development as intense as the claustrophobic setting until he’s ready to unleash a bravura, hyperextended denouement. A wonderful corrective for your pandemic-induced cabin fever. Yes, things could be much, much worse” – Kirkus Reviews

“Enjoyable … Fans of intelligent police procedurals will be rewarded” – Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

A fine, character-rich mystery

Booklist on Ball Park

The perfect read-alike for Louise Penny's Armand Gamache novels

Booklist on Perish the Day

2020-10-14
Farrow’s brutal take on the locked-room mystery presents a murder committed inside a secure group ward in the Joliette Institution for Women near Montreal in 1994.

Lady Jail doesn’t confine its residents in separate cells but parcels them out in group quarters, like the one in which eight women doing time together suddenly find their number abruptly reduced to seven. Someone has strangled Florence, who’s locked up for throwing acid in a rival’s face, in the group bathroom using a length of wire that's been smuggled in. The killer is clearly one of the other prisoners—senior inmate Doi, who attacked her daughter with a hatchet; Malka, the next oldest, who poisoned her husband; Temple, who smuggles guns for the mob; Rozlynn, who celebrated her 18th birthday by killing her father; Courtney, who stabbed her best friend to death when she caught her flirting; her inseparable pal, Jodi, who shot a man during her boyfriend’s convenience-store robbery; and newcomer Abigail, an embezzler who’s still hiding the millions she stole—unless it’s really correctional officer Isaure Dabrezil, who’s working at Lady Jail during her yearlong suspension from the Sûreté du Québec. The job of figuring out whodunit is given to DS Émile Cinq-Mars, of the Montreal Police Service fraud squad, because he arrested Abi and because Dabrezil’s presence would render any SQ investigation problematic. Farrow keeps the story’s development as intense as the claustrophobic setting until he’s ready to unleash a bravura, hyperextended denouement.

A wonderful corrective for your pandemic-induced cabin fever. Yes, things could be much, much worse.

Kirkus Reviews