From Amazon
As John Farrow's Ice Lake opens, a corpse, shot through the neck, is found under the ice in a fishing hut on a frozen lake near Montreal. It's the dead of winter in a region that Farrow (a pseudonym for literary author Trevor Ferguson, whose critically acclaimed novels include The Fire Line) knows like the back of his hand: its back alleys and distant suburbs, its ethnic diversity and big city evil, the long black nights and searingly bright days of its unrelenting winters. He also reveals intimate knowledge of the diverse power groups that drive the novel's plot: the biker gangs, the Mohawk Warriors, the Mob, the bigwigs in the lucrative pharmaceutical industry looking to cash in on an AIDS cure, the various police forces with their petty animosities and territorial conflicts.
Since the advent of Sherlock Holmes, though, most detective thrillers stand or fall on the qualities of their lead character. In Detective Émile Cinq-Mars (whom he introduced in the bestselling City of Ice), Ferguson has created a man of genuine emotions, highly ethical yet thoroughly practical, an old-style, straight-ahead cop. He doesn't leap tall buildings (or frozen lakes) in a single bound, but he knows how to keep digging in his own dogged style. A likable lead detective, a wintry ice maze of a plot, and a supporting cast of characters some of whom are patently vicious and others satisfyingly complex all make Ice Lake a captivating thriller. --Mark Frutkin
From Publishers Weekly
A taut and gripping mystery is on offer in Farrow's quietly powerful follow-up to City of Ice, but only once the reader gets past the jarring reverse flashbacks in the first two chapters. The opening few pages contain an information-packed summation of the novel's plot: two New York City cops have come to Montreal to consult with Det. Sgt. mile Cinq-Mars and his partner Bill Mathers about suspicious AIDS deaths in Manhattan, which have been linked to two Montreal women known only as Saint Lucy and Camille. The story then backtracks three days to the discovery of a dead body under the ice at the Lake of Two Mountains, northwest of Montreal; when it backtracks again to December of the previous year, we learn who the dead body is, and how and why he got there. Once everything becomes chronological, the novel turns into a Hitchcockian tale of betrayal and competing interests, where the audience sees more than any of the individual characters do, and suspense is generated by knowing who the bad guys are and watching as the good guys are gulled (or killed) by them. Canadian author Farrow's style is very low-key and quiet, but it creates a kind of cold stillness in which every revelation echoes for miles; a stillness resides in Cinq-Mars, too, whose experience of human behavior gives him insight into the actions of everyone from Mohawk Indians to his dying father. In the end, it's the characters, not the mystery, despite its clever twists and turns, that carries Farrow's tale. Agent, Anne McDermid.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Farrow (City of Ice) strikes the right note from the start of this whodunit, which begins with the discovery of a frozen body in the ice under a fishing hut on a lake northwest of Montreal. Complications multiply when Sergeant-Detective mile Cinq-Mars, who debuted in the author's previous thriller and who stands straight as a mainmast, is maneuvered into tracking down the murderer. In unfolding the story, and long before the climactic episode is reached, Farrow takes his readers from one dramatic crisis to another, spinning a tale that involves rival pharmaceutical companies seeking to be the first to find a cure for AIDS and a bumper crop of amoral characters. In the first part of the book, the rapid shift of focus makes demands on the reader's concentration, but once the characters and forces are clear, each new scene contributes to the whole. Armchair detectives who delight in spotting clues and following verbal deductions will appreciate this effort. A.J. Anderson, GSLIS, Simmons Coll., Boston
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
"I'm fighting against death, and how crazy is that?" It's a battle that even Emile Cinq-Mars, star detective of the Montreal police, can't win, whether the grim reaper has set his sights on Cinq-Mars' own father, on 42 AIDS victims who were fed drugs designed to hasten the effects of the disease, or on a growing number of people caught in the cover-up surrounding the drug scam. Canadian novelist Farrow follows his superb first mystery, City of Ice (1999), with an equally outstanding second effort in what now must now be recognized as one of the best series in crime fiction. Following the trail of a corpse found submerged in an ice-fishing hole, the mercurial Cinq-Mars--a fascinating combination of Inspector Morse and Charlie Resnick, the laser-like intelligence and hauteur of the former mixed with the compassion and procedural know-how of the latter--unravels a truly horrendous scheme orchestrated by the greedy CEO of a drug research company and his psychotic lover. Their plan to gather (and then sell) groundbreaking data on the AIDS virus is unknowingly carried out by a Native American researcher who distributes the lethal drug cocktail, convinced that she is saving lives not ending them. As in City of Ice, Farrow combines a marvelously detailed, brilliantly structured plot with a multifaceted, extremely moving human drama in which Cinq-Mars, "who carried with him a sense of the world's need for redemption," again finds himself forced to act on his own, "answering to the angels and the saints, whether or not they watched or cared." Inevitably, Cinq-Mars solves the case but loses the battle with death, his father's passing at the end of the novel a reminder that lives can be saved only temporarily. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
The English just love a literary tempest in a teapot. Starting in the spring and sputtering on through the summer, critics for such decent publications as The Observer, The New Statesmen and Granta harrumphed about—wait for it—the 'death of the English novel.' Yes, it sounds like a case of déjà vu all over again, but the key argument is worth noting. Andrew Marr in The Observer provoked the bun fight when he claimed that even the best British fiction is mere entertainment, "competing with the telly or PlayStation." Marr said that the authors of history, biography and science books are more brilliant and more 'dangerous' than current novelists; furthermore, non-fiction writers are the ones who bring us urgent news of our times. A reply by novelist Jason Cowley in The New Statesmen, got me thinking about crime fiction and about John Farrow's detective, Emile Cinq-Mars. Cowley said British novels are 'clever but empty,' that few writers can do 'character and narrative.' In fine high falutin' style, Cowley concluded that "fiction in Britain long ago ceased to be an act of moral inquiry."
In that sweeping comment, Cowley sneered at a whole array of fine writers, like P. D. James. If he had put aside his genre snobbery and looked beyond the motherland, Cowley might have noticed that U.S. and Canadian mystery/thriller writers are offering 'urgent news' arising from 'moral inquiry, character and narrative'. James Lee Burke's detective, Dave Robichaud, trolls the American South and finds racism still endemic. James Ellroy sets his noir novels against backdrops like the Vietnam War or probes the machinations behind the Kennedy assassination. In City of Ice and now Ice Lake, Montreal's Trevor Ferguson (under the pseudonym John Farrow) offers a priestly detective engaged in a moral quest, colorful gangsters and story lines arising from contemporary calamities, such as biker warfare in Quebec, the after-shocks of the Oka crisis and the AIDS epidemic.
Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars is in his late 50s and something of a celebrity on the Montreal police force. He has a 'beaky' nose and is overly fond of bacon and eggs. He lives on a horse farm with his younger, sexy wife, Sandra. Part Native, part French, Cinq-Mars is engaged in a secular battle against evil. In a memorable scene from City of Ice, Cinq-Mars sits in his car atop Mount Royal lit by a nearby electric cross; Ferguson describes him as "the last, the very last to erode." In Ice Lake, Ferguson plays more elaborately with the priest metaphor. Cinq-Mars' father had yearned to become a priest and failed; Emile was raised knowing the priesthood might be in his own future. Instead, he became a cop who breaks the rules in complicated games against the 'bad' guys: "As a police officer who carried with him a sense of the world's need for redemption, and not merely justice, there were times.when he would act on his own, preferring to answer to the angels and the saints. His work was every bit as precious, every bit as ordained, every bit as consecrated as a life in the priesthood."
Cinq-Mars is a powerful creation but largely absent from the first third of Ice Lake. The novel opens with Cinq-Mars and his partner, Bill Mathers ice-fishing on Lake of Two Mountains, a couple of hours from Montreal. A body is discovered under the ice in a nearby shack. Much of the ensuing action takes place in this rural community which is surrounded by a Mohawk reserve known for its act of resistance during the Oka crisis, a monastery and two rival pharmaceutical firms. The story loops back in time and the focus shifts to Lucy Gabriel. She is a lab technician at Hillier-Largent Pharmaceuticals but also a Native who was briefly famous for her courage on the barricades during the Oka crisis. Seductive, beautiful and a deeply moral woman, Lucy rapidly transforms into a kind of Florence Nightingale helping desperate AIDS patients in New York and New Jersey. In a series of economical scenes, Lucy secretly travels in a mobile lab across the border and treats the patients with highly experimental drugs. Hillier-Largent is desperate to hit the financial jackpot by discovering a cure for AIDS. Stirred into this mix are a number of other characters: Andrew Stettler, a mobster who becomes—of all things—head of security for Biologika, a rival firm. Werner Honigwachs, the brilliant boss of Biologika, who uses mob money to fund his research, and Camille Choquette, a single mom, who is sleeping with both Werner and a local cop, Charlie Painchaud.
The drama initially unfolds at a modest tempo; some readers will grow impatient with Cinq-Mars' absence and the ultimate meaning of Lucy's forays into New York. Farrow, however, is neatly setting up a serpentine hall of mirrors; when the story comes forward in time with the murder, and Cinq-Mars gets on the case, events start to ricochet and our assumptions fracture.
Farrow cranks up the narrative torque considerably with an attempt on Cinq-Mars' life. In the remainder of the novel we are treated to sudden twists and revelations, and sporadic bouts of sex and violence. The Mohawk Warriors are drawn more directly into the story along with Jacques, a vicious gangster fond of white cadillacs. Like Dennis Lehane's recent Mystic River, the most evil character in Ice Lake is acting out a deadly script that originates in a traumatic childhood ordeal. As a result, several victims turn up with their mouths sewn firmly shut. The climactic shoot-out comes, suitably, in a monastery. Farrow allows us to eavesdrop on 'mind games,' whereby individual characters try to anticipate behaviours and discern motivation. Cinq-Mars himself eschews the fancy trappings of modern police work like computer analysis and scientific craft. He prefers "to get into the heads of criminals, figure them out, trap them by anticipating their behavioiur." For readers, these speculations can resemble imaginary chess games that are sometimes absorbing and sometimes lacking in crediblility.
A weakness of City of Ice was the relationship between Cinq-Mars and Mathers, his younger, English-Canadian partner. In Ice Lake somewhat archaic words mar the chemistry. Would hard-boiled detectives and cons 'chuckle' or 'chortle?’; Farrow's use of 'jalopy' and 'caterwaul' doesn't exactly lend authenticity to a contemporary tale of gangster warfare. Still, in some ways the banter between Cinq-Mars and Mathers is a vast improvement over City of Ice. There's a wry, buoyant humour here that's often amusing and Cinq-Mars takes himself less seriously. When Cinq-Mars gobbles too much breakfast and suffers with cramps during an interrogation and then stumbles with mispronunciations of Honigwachs' name, we feel the prick of sharp satire. Overall, the set piece interrogation of Honigwachs is a fascinating encounter as the wary, sophisticated adversaries interweave metaphors of space and time with chat about horses and crime. Farrow also reveals a more emotional side of Cinq-Mars here, as he copes with the approaching death of his father.
Less ambitious than City of Ice, Farrow's Ice Lake offers more subtle pleasures than those to be found with 'Playstation or the telly.' Rumour has it that Ferguson, after fulfilling his pricey contract for two thrillers, is eager to work on another literary novel. Books like The Fire Line and The Timekeeper are worlds away from Ice Lake, though all of Ferguson's work wrestles with moral choices in a world where redemption is only a remote possibility. Now that Ferguson has enjoyed the sight of his thrillers on the racks at Costco and Price Club, it's time for his neglected literary work to be recognized by a similarly large audience. --Keith Nickson (Books in Canada) -- Books in Canada --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
In that sweeping comment, Cowley sneered at a whole array of fine writers, like P. D. James. If he had put aside his genre snobbery and looked beyond the motherland, Cowley might have noticed that U.S. and Canadian mystery/thriller writers are offering 'urgent news' arising from 'moral inquiry, character and narrative'. James Lee Burke's detective, Dave Robichaud, trolls the American South and finds racism still endemic. James Ellroy sets his noir novels against backdrops like the Vietnam War or probes the machinations behind the Kennedy assassination. In City of Ice and now Ice Lake, Montreal's Trevor Ferguson (under the pseudonym John Farrow) offers a priestly detective engaged in a moral quest, colorful gangsters and story lines arising from contemporary calamities, such as biker warfare in Quebec, the after-shocks of the Oka crisis and the AIDS epidemic.
Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars is in his late 50s and something of a celebrity on the Montreal police force. He has a 'beaky' nose and is overly fond of bacon and eggs. He lives on a horse farm with his younger, sexy wife, Sandra. Part Native, part French, Cinq-Mars is engaged in a secular battle against evil. In a memorable scene from City of Ice, Cinq-Mars sits in his car atop Mount Royal lit by a nearby electric cross; Ferguson describes him as "the last, the very last to erode." In Ice Lake, Ferguson plays more elaborately with the priest metaphor. Cinq-Mars' father had yearned to become a priest and failed; Emile was raised knowing the priesthood might be in his own future. Instead, he became a cop who breaks the rules in complicated games against the 'bad' guys: "As a police officer who carried with him a sense of the world's need for redemption, and not merely justice, there were times.when he would act on his own, preferring to answer to the angels and the saints. His work was every bit as precious, every bit as ordained, every bit as consecrated as a life in the priesthood."
Cinq-Mars is a powerful creation but largely absent from the first third of Ice Lake. The novel opens with Cinq-Mars and his partner, Bill Mathers ice-fishing on Lake of Two Mountains, a couple of hours from Montreal. A body is discovered under the ice in a nearby shack. Much of the ensuing action takes place in this rural community which is surrounded by a Mohawk reserve known for its act of resistance during the Oka crisis, a monastery and two rival pharmaceutical firms. The story loops back in time and the focus shifts to Lucy Gabriel. She is a lab technician at Hillier-Largent Pharmaceuticals but also a Native who was briefly famous for her courage on the barricades during the Oka crisis. Seductive, beautiful and a deeply moral woman, Lucy rapidly transforms into a kind of Florence Nightingale helping desperate AIDS patients in New York and New Jersey. In a series of economical scenes, Lucy secretly travels in a mobile lab across the border and treats the patients with highly experimental drugs. Hillier-Largent is desperate to hit the financial jackpot by discovering a cure for AIDS. Stirred into this mix are a number of other characters: Andrew Stettler, a mobster who becomes—of all things—head of security for Biologika, a rival firm. Werner Honigwachs, the brilliant boss of Biologika, who uses mob money to fund his research, and Camille Choquette, a single mom, who is sleeping with both Werner and a local cop, Charlie Painchaud.
The drama initially unfolds at a modest tempo; some readers will grow impatient with Cinq-Mars' absence and the ultimate meaning of Lucy's forays into New York. Farrow, however, is neatly setting up a serpentine hall of mirrors; when the story comes forward in time with the murder, and Cinq-Mars gets on the case, events start to ricochet and our assumptions fracture.
Farrow cranks up the narrative torque considerably with an attempt on Cinq-Mars' life. In the remainder of the novel we are treated to sudden twists and revelations, and sporadic bouts of sex and violence. The Mohawk Warriors are drawn more directly into the story along with Jacques, a vicious gangster fond of white cadillacs. Like Dennis Lehane's recent Mystic River, the most evil character in Ice Lake is acting out a deadly script that originates in a traumatic childhood ordeal. As a result, several victims turn up with their mouths sewn firmly shut. The climactic shoot-out comes, suitably, in a monastery. Farrow allows us to eavesdrop on 'mind games,' whereby individual characters try to anticipate behaviours and discern motivation. Cinq-Mars himself eschews the fancy trappings of modern police work like computer analysis and scientific craft. He prefers "to get into the heads of criminals, figure them out, trap them by anticipating their behavioiur." For readers, these speculations can resemble imaginary chess games that are sometimes absorbing and sometimes lacking in crediblility.
A weakness of City of Ice was the relationship between Cinq-Mars and Mathers, his younger, English-Canadian partner. In Ice Lake somewhat archaic words mar the chemistry. Would hard-boiled detectives and cons 'chuckle' or 'chortle?’; Farrow's use of 'jalopy' and 'caterwaul' doesn't exactly lend authenticity to a contemporary tale of gangster warfare. Still, in some ways the banter between Cinq-Mars and Mathers is a vast improvement over City of Ice. There's a wry, buoyant humour here that's often amusing and Cinq-Mars takes himself less seriously. When Cinq-Mars gobbles too much breakfast and suffers with cramps during an interrogation and then stumbles with mispronunciations of Honigwachs' name, we feel the prick of sharp satire. Overall, the set piece interrogation of Honigwachs is a fascinating encounter as the wary, sophisticated adversaries interweave metaphors of space and time with chat about horses and crime. Farrow also reveals a more emotional side of Cinq-Mars here, as he copes with the approaching death of his father.
Less ambitious than City of Ice, Farrow's Ice Lake offers more subtle pleasures than those to be found with 'Playstation or the telly.' Rumour has it that Ferguson, after fulfilling his pricey contract for two thrillers, is eager to work on another literary novel. Books like The Fire Line and The Timekeeper are worlds away from Ice Lake, though all of Ferguson's work wrestles with moral choices in a world where redemption is only a remote possibility. Now that Ferguson has enjoyed the sight of his thrillers on the racks at Costco and Price Club, it's time for his neglected literary work to be recognized by a similarly large audience. --Keith Nickson (Books in Canada) -- Books in Canada --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
Only the back of the corpse's head is visible, the remainder of the body concealed in the murk of the frozen lake. Pulled up by his hair through the circular ice fishing hole, the victim bears the mark of a single bullet through the now-frozen flesh of his neck. It's official: Detective Émile Cinq-Mars knows he was lured here, the unknown woman's invitation to meet at a familiar ice fishing spot now transformed into a murder investigation. Only there's something different about this crime scene, something that tells the veteran policeman that in some way, his nose is being rubbed in this murder - in some way, this is about to become very personal.
ICE LAKE is John Farrow's blockbuster sequel to CITY OF ICE, the mystery thriller that catapulted onto the bestseller lists, selling 50,000 copies in Canada to date, and making Detective Cinq-Mars and an ice-cold city of Montreal, searingly white-hot.
Émile Cinq-Mars has touched a chord with readers. He's an old-style detective - independent, eschewing technology and teamwork in favor of his smarts, his intuition, and a few well-placed informants. But his world is as contemporary and immediate as today's headlines, where pharmaceutical companies will stop at nothing to get a jump on the competition in the battle to find an AIDS cure. This is the world of ICE LAKE, WHERE THE MURDER VICTIM'S TIES TO A DRUG COMPANY SOON SPIN OUT OF CONTROL INTO A COMPLEX UNIVERSE PEOPLED BY A BEAUTIFUL NATIVE ACTIVIST TRYING TO SAVE THE WORLD, THE RUTHLESS MEMBERS OF ORGANIZED CRIME SECTS, AND THE MACHO COPS OF COMPETING POLICE FACTIONS. IT'S UP TO THE BELEAGUERED CINQ-MARS TO FIGURE OUT THE CONSPIRACIES AND COUNTER-CONSPIRACIES, THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WOULD-BE FRIENDS AND DEADLY ENEMIES - BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE.
LIKE ITS PREDECESSOR, CITY OF ICE, ICE LAKE HAS RAISED THE BAR IN THE THRILLER GENRE, DAZZLING IN ITS PLOT AND STRIKINGLY INTELLIGENT CHARACTERIZATION. IT WILL BE PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE IN THE US AND UK.
About the Author
JOHN FARROW (a.k.a. Trevor Ferguson) was raised in Montreal and has lived and worked all across Canada. He is the author of seven critically acclaimed novels, including HIGH WATER CHANTS, ONYX JOHN, THE KINKAJOU, THE TRUE LIFE ADVENTURES OF SPARROW DRINKWATER, THE FIRE LINE and THE TIMEKEEPER. CITY OF ICE, his first thriller published under the John Farrow pseudonym, was a national bestseller. He lives in Hudson, Quebec.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Wednesday aftermoon, February 16, 1999
A solitary, deep bong resounded from the antique mantel clock lovingly restored by Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars and placed on the top shelf of his office cubicle the same day the department had installed a computer on his desk. "What coincidence?" he'd snapped at the first person daring to ask the question. "A mouse needs a clock. If I'm under orders to live with one, the rest of you can damn well live with the other. Like it or not."
If a riddle was involved, his colleagues presumed that an explanation would not be forthcoming anytime soon.
From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
A solitary, deep bong resounded from the antique mantel clock lovingly restored by Sergeant-Detective Emile Cinq-Mars and placed on the top shelf of his office cubicle the same day the department had installed a computer on his desk. "What coincidence?" he'd snapped at the first person daring to ask the question. "A mouse needs a clock. If I'm under orders to live with one, the rest of you can damn well live with the other. Like it or not."
If a riddle was involved, his colleagues presumed that an explanation would not be forthcoming anytime soon.
From the Hardcover edition. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
