"Canada's answer to Elmore Leonard is going places" -- Toronto Star
Detectives Price and McKeon are called to the scene -- a husband and
wife found slumped in their car, parked sideways on a busy downtown
on-ramp, a bullet in each of their heads. That's what's in the papers,
and that's all the public sees. Toronto the Good, with occasional specks
of random badness. But behind that disposable headline, Toronto's shadow
city sprawls outwards, a grasping and vicious economy of drugs, guns,
sex, and gold bullion. And that shadow city feels just like home for Get
-- a Detroit boy, project-raised, ex-army, Iraq and Afghanistan, only
signed up for the business opportunities, plenty of them over there. Now
he's back, and he's been sent up here by his family to sell guns to
Toronto's fast-rising biker gangs, maybe even see about a partnership.
The man Get needs to talk to is Nugs, leader of the Saints of Hell. Nugs
is overseeing unprecedented progress, taking the club national, uniting
bikers coast-to-coast (by force if necessary), pushing back against the
Italians, and introducing a veneer of respectability. Beards trimmed to
goatees, golf shirts instead of leather jackets, and SUVs replacing the
bikes. And now the cops can't tell the difference between bikers and
bankers.Detectives Price and McKeon? All they can do is watch and
grimace and drink, and sweep up the detritus left in crime's wake --
dead hookers, cops corrupted and discarded, anyone else too slow and
weak to keep up, or too stupid not to get out of the way. This is
Toronto's shadow city, and you won't recognize it.
