|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
Product Description
Quill & Quire
Next time I need to score handguns, hookers, or heroin in Toronto, I’m going to look up John McFetridge, a crime writer who clearly knows his way around the city. One of the key elements in McFetridge’s second novel, which bears the intentionally ironic handle Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (after the Neil Young song), is the sheer immensity of what the author points out is North America’s fourth-largest metropolitan centre. In one of the book’s many spot-on and streetwise descriptions of Toronto’s disparate locales – in this case, the Jane/Finch shopping centre – McFetridge comments that the city “built its ghetto way out in the burbs, never thinking it was a growth industry.” This Nowhere really is known to everybody, at least everybody who lives in a big enough city. Growth is the literal root of the evil driving the book, which crashes open with a man’s swan dive from the balcony of an apartment building that houses more marijuana plants than residents. A pair of detectives is tasked with not only figuring out whether the death is homicide or suicide, but with the less-than-simple act of giving the body a name. By the time they have that name, fully halfway through the book, the entire homicide division is entangled in the case, and the city has been crossed repeatedly. Crime, like rust, never sleeps. Not so much larger than life as just alive, the Greater Toronto Area itself is the most conflicted protagonist in a novel brimming with them. “As if happy people in rent-controlled public housing will live side by side with happy people in expensive condos,” spits a seasoned patrol officer surveying a housing project being forcibly converted into a mixed-income neighbourhood. McFetridge’s style can be compared to Elmore Leonard’s, as both writers seamlessly mix police procedural with perp procedural to underscore the parallel lives of members of the opposing teams. But where Leonard tends to favour Hollywood-homicide banter, McFetridge keeps the quips to a minimum, preferring punch to panache. As a result, the only time his prose gets purple is when fists are flying.
Review
"McFetridge combines a tough and gritty story populated by engagingly seedy characters . . . with an effective use of a setting, Toronto." —Booklist
"Rapaciously ambitious, swaggeringly assured, brash beneath its cultured veneer, ripe with opportunity and tottering on the brink of anarchy." —Declan Burke, author, Eight-ball Boogie
"McFetridge navigates a breathless plot punctuated by slick, staccato dialogue . . . . A breakout effort for McFetridge and a rude awakening for the rest of us. Toto, we're not in your momma's Toronto anymore." —Winnipeg Free Press
"[McFetridge] has a gift for dialogue and setting . . . [and] is an author to watch. He has a great eye for detail, and Toronto has never looked seedier." —Globe and Mail
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
There are no customer reviews yet.
|
|||
|
Video reviews
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
Your Recent History
(What's this?)|
After viewing product detail pages or search results, look here to find an easy way to navigate back to pages you are interested in. |
