Description
Book SynopsisFinalist, CrimeWriters of Canada 2024 Awards of Excellence, Best Crime Novel category
When a killing spree threatens Dundurn, MacNeice risks everything to protect his team and put an end to it.
Detective Superintendent MacNeice returns to Dundurn following a month-long suspension and is immediately thrown into the mysterious case of a wounded runner named Jack and a blood trail that spans over forty miles. At the trail's source in a Carolinian forest, MacNeice and DI Fiza Aziz find evidence of two homicides, but no bodies.
Two days later, Mac is called to a torn-up orchard set ablaze by lightning. A body has been found lying next to a stack of burnt fruit trees. There's no evidence to suggest the killings are related, and yet MacNeice suspects they are. Buy why disappear the bodies in the forest and leave the orchard corpse to be discovered?
As the case develops, the team is confronted by the daylight abduc
Trade Review
Fast-paced, with action, violence, and suspense, but the author takes time to paint each scene fully, with details in the background and foreground, with action and nuances of conversation … A highly satisfying read.
* Miramichi Reader *
With each MacNeice book, Scott Thornley takes the reader deeper into the forest of the human soul. These are, yes, detective stories, but they are also novels about a detective. For MacNeice, nearly every action undertaken in pursuit of perpetrators of horrible murders opens up vistas: of his psyche; of his love for his late wife with whom he periodically communicates; of sentient nature, dogs, birds, actual forests; and of the explicable and inexplicable in the always-slightly-glimpsed souls of his colleagues and of each criminal, down to every minor character whether a caring nurse or a gangster’s stooge. In this, Thornley’s writing is virtuoso, as it also is in his descriptions of modern technology, forensics, and the crimes themselves which are described with such hyper-realism that they seem almost dreamlike. Would that they were. These horrors are what the human mind is capable of devising and, sometimes, of doing. Thornley uses poetry well—“well” means near-invisibly—to handle soul-unknowables. One killer says, “Shuffle the letters of veil and you have evil.” The motor of detective fiction is cause-and-effect. Thornley honours that in his intricate puzzle of a plot, then goes on to depict, character by character, cause-and-effect as the least of it. That is the mark of memorable literature. Middlemen is literature
* Richard W. Halperin, poet *
Executed bodies and disappeared chaps, both rich and hench-level, keep things hopping for rogue homicide cop MacNiece … A strange but entertaining story.
* Winnipeg Free Press *
