Roar Back

by John Farrow

Overview

"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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780727889379
Publisher:	Severn House
Publication date:	05/05/2020
Series:	Émile Cinq-Mars Series , #8
Edition description:	First World Publication
Pages:	256
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 seven previous novels in the Émile Cinq-Mars thriller series and seven literary novels under his own name. Booklist in New York has called his crime series the best of our time. Die Zeit in Germany has called it the best of all time.

Editorial Reviews

03/09/2020

A prologue set in 1958 in a run-down Montreal neighborhood, Park Extension (“the juvenile delinquency capital of Canada”), sets the ominous tone for Farrow’s gripping eighth Émile Cinq-Mars novel (after 2019’s Ball Park). Flash forward to 1978, to Cinq-Mars’s first day on the job with his new rank of sergeant-detective. He’s called to an apartment house in Park Extension to investigate a curious set of burglaries: in one night, 17 of the building’s apartments and 11 storage sheds were broken into, with the thieves taking primarily toasters and coffee makers. In one of the apartments, Cinq-Mars discovers the body of a man “impaled through the neck with what looked like a machete.” Mafia members, Russian gangsters, Hells Angels, and dirty cops thicken the plot as the significance of the prologue, in which the police recruit an unidentified young man for a dangerous undercover mission, gradually becomes clear. Cinq-Mars’s wry, often amusing observations spice up the action. Fans of character-driven police procedurals will be satisfied. (May)

Publishers Weekly

A delight for followers of Louise Penny and Donna Leon

Booklist Starred Review of Seven Days Dead

“Not only does Farrow provide fascinating backstory on the Montreal underworld that sets up the series debut, the outstanding City of Ice (1999), but he also takes advantage of the opportunity to add still more layers to his nuanced portrait of Cinq-Mars”

Booklist

A fine, character-rich mystery

Booklist on Ball Park

One of my favorite series. I love Émile Cinq-Mars!

Lee Child

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

Booklist on Perish the Day

Farrow is an authoritative writer who creates characters with depth and plots that say something about them

New York Times on Seven Days Dead

★ 2020-02-09
Montreal cop Émile Cinq-Mars (Ball Park, 2019, etc.) follows a winding trail from 28 break-ins at an apartment complex to a gang war that could level a lot more than the playing field.

After punching holes in the windows of 17 of the apartments and snipping the locks on the storage sheds of 11 more, the thieves helped themselves to all the toasters they could carry. Why take all this trouble on a single night to heist such negligible swag and leave behind a dead man pinned to the inside of a closet with a machete? Before Cinq-Mars, newly promoted to sergeant-detective in 1978, can get much further than asking this question, his retired mentor, Capt. Armand Touton, commands him to persuade the Rev. Alex Montour not to attend the parole hearing to urge the release of car thief Johnny Bondar, who really needs to stay in prison. Montour, a pastor who turns out to be a woman, won’t be persuaded; Bondar is duly set loose; and things promptly get weirder and more violent. Soon after Cinq-Mars and Detective Norville "Poof-Poof" Geoffrion, the hapless partner assigned to him, interview Moira Ellibee, a robbery victim who assured them that the man who assaulted her in the process must have been an apparition because she’s been under the personal protection of the Blessed Virgin since she was 14, mobster Dominic "The Dime" Letourneau and his mistress du jour are blown to pieces. When Poof-Poof follows Detective Alfred Morin and Sergeant-Detective Jerôme LaFôret, the homicide detectives who’ve grabbed the machete murder from them, to Bondar’s coming-out party, Bondar is killed along with Poof-Poof. All these crimes are connected, more or less, by the figure of Willy "Coalface" d’Alessandro, a cop whose two decades undercover with the mob have given him a tapestry of loyalties as complicated as his survival instinct is simple.

Remarkable stuff. Fans of Bill James’ Harpur and Iles saga of cops and robbers are in for quite a treat.

Kirkus Reviews

“Not only does Farrow provide fascinating backstory on the Montreal underworld that sets up the series debut, the outstanding City of Ice (1999), but he also takes advantage of the opportunity to add still more layers to his nuanced portrait of Cinq-Mars”

Booklist

A fine, character-rich mystery

Booklist on Ball Park