What’s surprising about Howard Shrier’s newest novel featuring his recurring private detective, Jonah Geller, is that it took this long to send his PI to Montreal. The city, after all, has a colourful history of crime, one that hasn’t softened as much from the post-Second World War gangster heyday as one supposes. And Shrier, who previously dropped Geller into Buffalo, Chicago and Boston, knows Montreal well, from birth through early career as crime reporter for a now-defunct newspaper. But Shrier cooks up all sorts of trouble for Geller in Miss Montreal, that more than makes up for perceived lost time.
When an old childhood friend turns up dead in Montreal, the victim’s grandfather hires Geller to do what the police can’t. Off Jonah goes—accompanied, not that reluctantly, by his friend, former hit man Dante Ryan—to investigate, mostly as a means to put the personal damage of previous cases behind him, encountering “strange dark places with too many guns.” The dead man, Sammy Adler, had morphed from a shy 12-year-old at Camp Arrowhead, where Geller knew him, to a gadabout muckraking columnist with a keen interest in city politics, immigration policies, bad romantic attachments and 60-year-old secrets. It doesn’t take Geller long to figure that one of those things, if not all of them, led to Adler’s demise.
Even more so than in previous installments, the way Geller puts things together in Miss Montreal is a smart mix of deduction, instinct and being in the worst place at the best possible time. Jonah Geller can’t ever escape the darkness that haunts him, but there’s a sense—despite the dangers that befall him—that he has a better-than-even chance of making good with a bit of light. — Sarah Weinman, National Post
