Running from the Dead

Starred review from May 1, 2020
Knowles, the author of the Wilson series (Never Play Another Man's Game, 2012) and several fine stand-alones, including Tin Men (2018), here tells the story of a private eye, Sam Jones, in desperate need of personal and professional redemption. His multiyear search for a missing boy ended in tragedy. Can a new case, involving another missing child, have a different, happier conclusion? Canadian novelist Knowles is a strong writer, with a real sense of what makes bad people tick and what makes good people risk their lives to catch the bad ones. His prose style is top-notch, too?lean, hard-edged, and brutally honest when it needs to be. As stories of redemption go, this one is particularly interesting, mostly because it does not follow the typical story arc: an argument could be made, in fact, that Jones is even more down-and-out at the end of the story than he was at the beginning, but?and this may be Knowles' main point?perhaps being down-and-out, like recognizing beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. A must-read crime novel from a writer who deserves to be on the radar screens of a lot more genre readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

Starred review from April 20, 2020
As PI Sam Jones, the hero of this brilliantly woven crime novel from Canadian author Knowles (Tin Men), is paying the cashier in a Toronto coffee house, he notices blood on his cuff and goes to the bathroom to try and remove the stain. On the back of the bathroom door he notices a message “written with a calligrapher’s skill” in eyeliner that reads: “He is going to kill me, and I think I want him to.” Having worked on an abduction case for six years and failed to stop his client’s son’s murder, Jones determines to locate—and hopefully save—the person who wrote the message. Meanwhile, another client wants Jones’s help finding her father, who has disappeared from his assisted living facility. As Jones pursues the writer of the message and the missing father, he realizes it won’t be long before the police start looking for him for a crime that slowly and enticingly comes into focus. The blood on his cuff is one tantalizing clue. The realistic, multidimensional characters evolve, as do their relationships with one another. With any luck, Jones will be back for an encore.

Starred review from April 1, 2020
An Ontario private eye is given a week to find his path to redemption before the gates of hell close on him. For six years, Sam Jones filled every spare hour hunting for Adam Verne, who'd disappeared from his mother's home years before she hired Sam, demanding in return only a monthly update. When their latest meeting is only a week away, Sam's search ends in a basement he flees, leaving behind two corpses, one virtually mummified, the other brand-new. Since he made inquiries of the neighbors before descending into the death chamber, he knows it won't be long before Homicide Detective Scopes throws a lasso over him, but, certain that "knowing is worse than hope," he still can't bear to tell Ruth Verne what he's found until he has no choice. As the hours tick down, a graffito in a coffee-shop washroom--"He's going to kill me, and I think I want him too" [sic]--seems to offer his best shot at offsetting the crushing weight of his guilt. He resolves to find the young woman who left the message and do a better job rescuing her than he did rescuing Adam Verne. Against all odds, he does track down the lost soul with the help of barista Sheena and 80-year-old bank robber Willy Greene only to discover that she's even more lost than he'd thought. The noir world evoked by Knowles' brutally clipped prose is so dark that the smallest victories seem like miracles.

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