Howard Shrier follows up last year’s prize-winning Buffalo Jump with a foray into another American city in High Chicago that I thought was, if anything, even better than the first.
When Jonah Geller first appeared last year, in Buffalo Jump, he was a rather low-profile employee of Beacon Security, where he spent his time largely doing surveillance work. Now he has left that job to set up shop on his own as World Repairs, an ambitious name for a two-person firm that spends a lot of time avoiding the rent collector. But the name, if decidedly a little pretentious, does reflect Geller’s view of his role as a private investigator. Geller is a non-observant Jew, one who avoids synagogue and eats ham and eggs for breakfast, but he is committed to one precept of his childhood religion – tikkun olam – the obligation to repair the world, to leave it better than before. Thus the mission of the agency: “World Repairs: We do what we can do and fix what we can fix. Sometimes we’re messengers, sometimes mediators, and sometimes we forget to mind our manners.”
At the outset, the case he is hired to look into seems well within his remit. The daughter of a well-known Toronto property developer has evidently committed suicide and her mother is understandably distraught, blaming herself for having failed her child. Jonah’s brother Daniel (the “good” son, successful lawyer, pillar of the community, apple of his mother’s eye) suggests Jonah might be able to set her mind at rest. Daniel hopes that a nice quiet domestic investigation, a family affair, will keep Jonah out of the kind of trouble that threatens his life and, worse, embarrasses the family.
But Jonah is not one to mind his manners, if he smells something that needs fixing, and before long, he is up to his neck in exactly the kind of trouble that makes Daniel extremely cross. First he crosses swords with a major real estate developer and father of the dead girl and then, before you know it, he is across the border in Chicago, hot in pursuit of a Donald Trumpish sort of mega-builder who has ways of dealing with obstreperous private eyes.
He is ably assisted in all this by his business partner, lesbian Jenn Raudsepp and by the heavy artillery, the ex-hit man Dante Ryan, whom he joined forces with in his last adventure. Dante is now turned restauranteur and leading an exemplary life, but he has lost none of his underworld chops when they are required. Nor has Jonah, who may have high ethical standards, but who also has a black belt in karate and, a legacy of his training in the Israeli army, expertise in krav maga, a form of combat that emphasizes neutralizing your attacker and making a sage getaway, if possible.
Before it’s all over, a considerable amount of mayhem has taken place, some bad guys are quite satisfactorily dispatched, some surprising plot twists are unfurled, and some nail-biting suspense is developed. As is typically the case with this kind of story, events demand a certain suspension of disbelief (were crossing the border into the States only as easy as Dante Ryan, packing considerable heat, finds it here), but the characters, especially Jonah, are so attractive that we willingly go along for the ride.
The first novel in the series, Buffalo Jump, was named best first novel at the Arthur Ellis Awards this year. When a debut is that successful, we tend to keep our fingers crossed that the author can sustain the pace the next time out. No worries here – if anything, High Chicago is tighter, tauter, and speedier than its predecessor. I am looking forward to the next American city to receive a flying visit from Jonah Geller and his crew. — Yvonne Klein, Reviewing the Evidence
