Starred review from January 16, 2012
Set in 1926 Montreal, Canadian author Nixon’s stylish and assured first novel charts the struggles of Mick, a 27-year-old WWI veteran, to make a life for himself. Obsessed with Laura Dunphy, a lovely young temptress who rejects his advances, Mick has slipped into a downward spiral of morphine abuse that has gotten him kicked out of medical school. Then his adoptive brother, Jack, appears with a potentially lucrative job smuggling contraband liquor across the border into the States. Mick soon finds himself in a shadowy world of shifting alliances that includes the Chicago mob, the Canadian government, and even Harry Houdini. Mick is drawn inexorably deeper into the underworld, at the middle of which is the cipherlike Jack, along with a memorable cast of supporting players. Like Raymond Chandler, Nixon possesses a poet’s ear for the telling detail as well as the master’s gift of combining street-level realism with jaded romanticism.