THE STORM MURDERS

The heat of New Orleans collides with a frigid Quebec winter – and the frightening reality of the storm murders lands on the doorstep of Émile Cinq-Mars.

Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars, who has battled biker gangs and hardened criminals over the course of his career, is adjusting to retirement when a mysterious couple living in a farmhouse close to his home – and two officers called to investigate – are murdered. Quebec police are stymied, given that they cannot find so much as a footprint of the killer in the fresh snow. When the FBI shows up – well outside their jurisdiction – and lures Cinq-Mars into overseeing their own investigation, retirement is put on hold. Murders have taken place in the US in the aftermath of storms – hurricanes and tornadoes – that may be connected to the deaths in Quebec. Émile travels with his wife to New Orleans to bring himself up to speed with previous events and to enjoy a vacation – which soon unravels and becomes a hair-raising experience when his wife is kidnapped and a person shadowing them is found dead. What connects the murders in a Quebec farmhouse to the shootings of innocent citizens by police years earlier in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? How are a series of storm murders linked to an internal investigation inside the FBI? Why is a brilliant young female FBI agent at grave risk in Alabama? Why has the retired Émile Cinq-Mars been asked to investigate? JOHN FARROW is the nom de plume of TREVOR FERGUSON, the author of 10 novels and four produced plays. His crime novels, City of Ice and Ice Lake, under the name John Farrow, were published in major markets around the world and were re-issued in June 2011 in Canada along with his latest in the Émile Cinq-Mars series, River City. Booklist praised the Farrow series as the best of our time. His literary novels enjoyed dazzling critical acclaim. The Timekeeper won the Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and is now a feature film. Of his plays, one received an audience of over 22,000 in Montreal, while another enjoyed stupendous critical reception off-Broadway.