Vigilante Season

Fiction. Inspector Luc Vanier is back, and Montreal's Hochelaga district is in the throes of gentrification. Its drug dealers and prostitutes are disappearing, and Vanier, investigating the brutal death of one, suspects the neighbourhood cleanup may involve murdering the unwanted. The local Police Commander sees only declining crime rates and his improving career prospects, and is willing to go easy on a local militia group that's expanding its influence. When Vanier is suspended for brutality, he's on his own. He continues to probe the dark side of progress, while struggling to help his son, just back from Afghanistan and crippled by PTSD. As the threats against him mount, Vanier fights to prove his innocence and discover who really controls the streets. Have the government and police stepped back to allow the militia to impose order? Is the militia the price of order when governments run out of money?

"When Peter Kirby made his debut with THE DEAD OF WINTER some eighteen months ago, I was impressed by the strength of the writing coming from the pen of an unknown author. His second novel does not disappoint. His writing has become even more assured, and his ability to capture the atmosphere of various districts of Montreal in all their glory or squalor, coupled with a believable storyline drawn from the headlines, lends his books an immediacy that will keep the reader enthralled." - Jim Napier, Montreal Review of Books

"The novel offers more than a simple tale of the worthy few against the corrupt many. The author, himself a lawyer, provides bold heroes, but he also explores how corruption can be self-sabotaging, the very characteristics that encourage criminal conspiracy driving the conspirators to turn on each other. The result is a novel that, while straightforward, delivers more nuance than is typical for its genre, a promising follow-up to 2012's lauded THE DEAD OF WINTER." - Publishers Weekly


Genre: Mystery