Carve the Heart

October 21, 2019
Pasquella’s fast-paced sequel to Yard Dog explores the seamy side of Toronto through the eyes of former convict Jack Palace. Professional poker player Cassandra
, Jack’s former girlfriend who walked out on him 10 years earlier, needs his help. She owes $600,000 to Anton
, a violent gangster who hired her to front for him in a high-stakes poker game that she suspects was rigged. She wants to get out of her partnership with Anton, but the gangster is putting pressure on her to keep working for him and pay off her debt. Jack agrees to talk to Anton and ask him to back off, but his task is complicated after Cassandra disappears. Meanwhile, Anton seeks to recover his stash of coke from former biker Walter
, the father of Melody
, a vivacious stripper and Jack’s new girlfriend. Melody has risky plans of her own that raise the stakes. Pasquella vividly captures the dog-eat-dog existence of the Toronto underworld. Readers will relate to Jack, a white knight with a penchant for defending victimized women. Agent: Kelvin Kong, K2 Literary (Canada).

October 1, 2019
Jack Palace may be the world's only hard-boiled hero who can't stand guns. "Too impersonal," he says. "Too imprecise." There's more. We meet him as a knight in shining armor in the first few pages, pulverizing two goons he catches beating a young woman and warning them that if they misbehave again, "I'll come looking for you." Toronto-based Palace is the narrator of a story that doesn't stint on the bloodshed yet calls forth descriptive terms not often applied to the genre. Like "affecting" and "touching." He's an ex-con trying to reassemble himself as a bodyguard when the woman who dumped him a decade ago suddenly reappears. She's being threatened by a hard man to whom she owes a ton of money. Could Jack protect her? Then he learns his current love, the beautiful Melody, is working a swindle that could destroy her father. All for "imaginary pretend sparkly unicorn money." The two strands come together in a wonderfully staged and beautifully written finale that reveals the real hurt just underneath the formula gunplay. Getting impatient with hard-boiled conventions? Try this.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)