Snow Job

If you haven’t noticed it yet, my new Kirkus Reviews column is devoted to a review of The Storm Murders, which is due out from Minotaur next week. This is the fourth mystery novel by Canadian playwright-novelist Trevor Ferguson writing as “John Farrow.” And like the previous Farrow works (City of Ice, Ice Lake, and the lesser-known River City), it features Émile Cinq-Mars, once a sergeant-detective with Quebec’s Montreal Urban Community Police Department, but now retired to a horse farm--and with a bit too much quiet time on his hands.

As I explain in the Kirkus piece, The Snow Murders finds Cinq-Mars helping to investigate “the recent slaying of a quiet but mysterious couple who’d been living on another isolated Quebec farm.

Two cops who sped to the scene soon after the couple’s slaying met a similar fate, but whoever was responsible for the carnage vanished without leaving obvious clues--or even footprints in surrounding snow. The distinguishing characteristics of this case are that the wife of the farm couple was left naked (if unmolested), and both she and her husband “had the ring fingers of their left hands severed.”

Could this be another in a line of similar murders tracing back to the time of New Orleans’ Hurricane Katrina disaster? And why do all of the victims seem to have such dubious histories? Surrounded by law-enforcement types of questionable trustworthiness, it’s up to Cinq-Mars to stop a killer--before the ex-detective’s own life and that of his younger wife are sacrificed, too.

You’ll find my full review here.