The Book Review of Death

  THE BOOK

  REVIEW OF

  DEATH

  RICHARD KING

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Elias Dornal had the ability to block out the world and concentrate fully on his writing. He wrote book reviews for the Montreal free weekly, Reflection. The more complex the writing assignment, the more intense was Elias’s focus. The piece he was working on that night might have been less of a challenge for a more talented writer but Elias was not in the first, or even the second rank, of writers. Perhaps that was the reason he plied his literary trade in the world of book reviews and not book writing. Unbeknownst to those with whom he worked and to his friends, Elias desperately wanted to make his mark as a writer in the world beyond reviews. Novelists, regardless of their rank in the world of letters, got the respect Elias so desperately craved.

  He secretly devoted as much time as he could to his goal of writing a book that would catapult him from the trenches where book reviewers laboured to the heights where novelists lived and worked. He dreamed of attending writers’ conferences and workshops, appearing in bookstores and on university campuses. He longed to be interviewed on Q, the daily mid-morning radio show or The Sunday Edition, both on the CBC. He fantasised about having a clever and meaningful conversation with Charlie Rose on the Public Broadcasting Network. Had Elias confessed his ambition to anyone in Montreal’s tightly knit English literary community they would have thought, ‘poor fellow, his dreams outstrip his ability.’ Elias sensed this and it made him work harder to prove them wrong. And that is why he was engrossed in the task before him. Revenge, he believed, was a dish best served cold – and in print!

  Thus it was not surprising that Elias was unaware of the passage of time; a little more than an hour had elapsed since the phone call. He didn’t hear footsteps behind him and for the second time that night, he felt himself being choked. This time it was not hands that he felt around his neck but a piece of cloth. He grasped at the material using all his strength to pull it away from his neck. He clawed at the fabric but could not get his fingers under it and scratched his neck with the effort. Whoever was strangling him had the advantage of standing over a seated victim and pressing their weight against the back of the chair. Dornal felt pressure against his back, which meant that his attacker had a knee against the chair. ‘Fairman, you fuckhead,’ Dornal said, the words coming out as a whispered croak. He wanted to scream but he was choking, barely able to breathe. He believed that the writer had followed him to the office to make good on his threat. He wanted to yell for help and to curse the person pulling the material tighter and tighter, crushing all of the bones in his neck.

  The attacker kept the pressure on Elias’s windpipe for a couple of minutes after Dornal died to make certain that the life was squeezed out of him. Dornal’s body was arranged so that his forehead was resting on his right forearm, bent at the elbow and leaning against the table next to his laptop. Someone seeing him from behind would think that he had fallen asleep while working late. The attacker then gathered up the files that Dornal had been working on and used the piece of cloth, that only minutes before had been a murder weapon, to wipe the table, covering their tracks. After looking at the computer for a long moment, trying to decide whether or not to take it, the killer decided to leave it where it was, afraid that it had software that could trace its location. The files were important, though, and promised to be very interesting. Paper was still untraceable. Had the murderer been more thorough and in less of a hurry to leave the Reflection office, Elias’s briefcase might have caught their eye. As it was, it remained on the floor, most of it hidden between his right leg and the legs of the table. On the way out, the cloth came in very handy for touching door handles and the like so that there would be no fingerprints. The only evidence of the attacker’s presence was the lifeless body of Elias Dornal.

  Chapter 1

  I like book launches; except, that is, when they end in murder.

  A well-planned and well-run book launch is a little like Christmas or a milestone birthday. The author’s friends and family make a big fuss over him, they buy his book and even though they haven’t cracked the spine they tell him how great it must be, how much they are looking forward to reading it and what a great talent he is. And the author, for his part, gets a serious cramp in his writing hand from autographing so many copies. I especially like book launches when I know the author. I get a great feeling of satisfaction seeing them and their work celebrated.

  I’m Sam Wiseman and my partner, Jennifer Riccofia, and I own the Dickens & Compagnie Bookstore in Montreal. We hold as many author events as we can; it’s our way of supporting writers and competing with the large chain stores that have come to dominate book retailing. The book launch we were hosting on a warm Wednesday night in early May was an extra-special one for me as we were launching the new novel, Water Night, written by my best friend, Ben Fairman.

  Ben has a large family and an even larger group of friends so the store was crowded, and the weather was pleasant enough that people were spilling out onto the sidewalk. Our store is conveniently located on McGill College Avenue, in sight of the Roddick Gates, the main entrance to McGill University.

  Jennifer and I promote author events in the usual way – we post invitations on our personal Facebook pages and on the store’s Facebook page and website, we send out emails to our customers and we make certain that there are signs posted in key places in the store. The publisher and the author use their social media platforms in pretty much the same way. And if all goes well, as it promised to this evening for Ben’s launch, we sell a lot of books – at a good event we can sell well over a hundred copies.

  My one exception to using social media is calling my friend Gaston Lemieux and his sister Gisèle. Gaston is a cop, a detective sergeant on the homicide squad of the Montreal Police Department. We met many years earlier when he was spending a day riding around with uniformed cops to show them that the more senior figures in the department valued their work. He was with them when they came to the store to arrest a shoplifter. We became friendly and he would drop by the store on a fairly frequent basis, whenever the mood struck him to buy an English book or to just hang out for a while and have a coffee with me. It was an unlikely friendship – a Jewish bookseller from a working-class family and a Québécois cop with a haut bourgeois background. We had similar interests and dissimilar outlooks and that meant we always had something to talk about.

  Our friendship became stronger when I became involved in a murder, first as a suspect and then as his associate, so to speak. Gaston was reluctant to include me in the investigation but I imposed on our friendship and pushed my way into the inquiry. I even made a significant contribution to the solution of the crime. I was able to make myself part of a murder probe on other occasions as well. I can’t say that Gaston welcomed my intrusions into his investigations but he came to tolerate them and gave me credit – sometimes grudgingly, I admit – when I made a contribution to them that helped in their solution.

  Through Gaston, I met his beautiful sister, Gisèle. Li
ke their father, she is a lawyer for the family firm; one of the large law offices in Montreal. I was smitten with Gisèle from the moment I met her and went out with her whenever possible. She is, to put it generously, relationship averse, and likes to keep me on my toes romantically. There will be periods where we spend a lot of time together, including the odd weekend trip to New York or, on a couple of occasions, to a lodge in the Laurentians. But then she will disappear from my life for a couple of months, forgetting to return my calls. To an outsider our relationship may have looked like an odd one, but it worked for us and that’s all that’s important.

  She did not, however, attend the book launch, but Gaston did. He arrived about thirty minutes into the event, just as the crowd grew to its largest number. There were people I knew well, such as author Robbie Kayn, and several other writers and publishers, and people who were complete strangers to me. It was the perfect mix of people likely to generate a lot of word-of-mouth sales for Ben’s book. Gaston and I were chatting in a corner of the store just behind the service desk. I try to keep an eye on things even when talking to my friends, but Gaston is two or three inches taller than me so he blocked my view of the door.

  Because of this I did not see Elias Dornal slip into the store.

  I don’t like Dornal, no one in the book industry does. He is the book reviewer for Reflection, one of Montreal’s free entertainment weeklies. The magazine is quite good in that most of its reviews of the music, movie and theatre scene are fair and well balanced, if not always salutary. And the staff does its best to ensure that its listings of all the cultural and entertainment events taking place in the city and its near suburbs are complete. The sterling exception to this policy is the book reviews penned by Elias Dornal. He dislikes almost everything of merit, in fact, the better the book the more he disparages it. The reason for this is clear: Dornal is a no-talent hack who has been unsuccessful in publishing anything other than his poisonous reviews.

  Gaston is unfailingly polite and when he moved off to buy a copy of Water Night and to get it signed by the author, I noticed Dornal. He was heading for the table that held the munchies and a box of cheap wine, and I suspect making certain to avoid me at the same time.

  I was surprised to see him. He had been to the store a couple of weeks earlier trying to buy a copy of Ben’s novel a week or so prior to its publication date. Reviewers are usually sent advance copies of the book so that their reviews will be published at the time the book goes on sale. Everyone in the book industry respects these rules – everyone except Dornal, that is. A year or so ago he published a negative review of a book from Metcalfe House, Ben’s publisher, a month before the publication date. The review seriously hurt the first week’s sales of the book and Metcalfe House made certain that Dornal never got another advance copy of any book they published. He had managed to alienate most of the publishers in Canada this way.

  Needless to say, I refused to sell him a copy of Ben’s book.

  I didn’t want to cause a scene by throwing Dornal out of the store but I didn’t trust him not to create some kind of ruckus, so I decided to keep a close eye on him. I made my way over to the food table where he was standing with a piece of cheese in one hand and plastic cup full to the brim with red wine in the other.

  Dornal is half a head shorter than me and skinny. He has a bad complexion and thinning hair the colour of a ripe pumpkin. He wears glasses that tend to slip down, which he tries to push back up by wiggling his nose, giving him the appearance of a nervous rabbit. His arms and legs seem to be unable to move in conjunction with one another, so even when he is standing still some part of him is always twitching. This evening he was carrying a sand-coloured ‘Bag of Holding’ briefcase that was slung bandolier-style from his left shoulder, with the strap running diagonally across his chest and the bag hanging over his ass. He wore a faded blazer that may have been tweed at one time. I was nervous that he would spill some wine on our carpet.

  ‘So, Sam, how’s it going?’ he asked as I approached. He raised his glass of wine in salute as shaking hands was impossible.

  ‘Great,’ I responded.

  He did not seem to notice that I did not ask how he was, so he continued with, ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’

  Just as I was about to suggest that he take his wine and cheese and get out of the store, Jennifer gave me the sign that it was time for the author to say a few words. The author’s thank you is as much a part of a book launch as the cheap wine and munchies.

  When Jennifer and I designed our bookstore we made certain to build a small stage in one of the front corners of it. We had a built-in sound system that included a jack for a microphone so that an author could be heard everywhere in the store. The stage was a couple of paces from where Dornal and I were standing. I made my way over and introduced Ben. I normally say nice things about the authors who have events at our store but in the case of Ben I was effusive. His family gave me a warm and prolonged round of applause.

  Ben thanked everybody for coming, thanked his family for their support and spent a few minutes talking about the book itself. I had told him to say only enough about the novel to generate sales and not to give away too much of the plot – a clear case of less being more. His remarks concluded, Ben stepped off the stage and I subtly steered him away from Elias Dornal.

  As the launch wound down I lost track of Ben and Dornal. That is, I lost sight of them until I noticed that they were standing on the street near to the front door of the store. Ben was saying goodbye to some people when Dornal came up to him. The journalist was sneering and had some rolled pages in his hand, which he was waving in Ben’s face. I couldn’t hear what Dornal was saying but I knew for an absolute certainty that he had managed to get his hands on a copy of Ben’s book and he was crowing about the review he had written attacking the novel. The pages he was waving were obviously a copy of his review. I moved as quickly as I could to get between Ben and him – and to pop Dornal a well-deserved punch on the nose if he didn’t shove off.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that Gaston was heading to the door. I don’t think he knew what was transpiring between Ben and Dornal, he was just leaving the launch.

  Gaston and I both reached the street at the same time, at the exact moment that Ben, normally the most placid of people, grabbed Dornal by the throat and shouted, ‘You fucker. If you publish one word of that crap, I swear to God, I’ll kill you.’ With his free hand he backhanded Dornal’s left elbow, the arm that was raised holding the copy of his review. The pages fluttered to the sidewalk and blew into the traffic of McGill College Avenue.

  Gaston knew that Ben was my best friend and gently but firmly removed Ben’s hand from Dornal’s throat. I pushed my way between the two of them and said, ‘Fuck off, Dornal. You’re a dickhead and I never want to see you in my store again.’

  ‘You can fuck yourself, wise-ass. I’ll go where I please,’ he said and headed off down McGill College Avenue.

  ‘Everything OK?’ Gaston asked.

  ‘Yeah, thanks. I think Ben needs a moment to cool off,’ I responded.

  ‘I think he needs more than that,’ Gaston informed me. ‘If a cop car had happened to be passing when your friend grabbed the guy, he’d have been arrested.’

  ‘You’re not suggesting that you plan to arrest him, are you?’ I was suddenly worried that an unimportant confrontation would end badly for Ben.

  ‘No, of course not,’ Gaston said, putting my mind at ease. ‘But tell your friend to keep control of his temper. It’s never a good idea to attack someone, no matter what the provocation.’

  ‘Yeah, for sure,’ I agreed.

  Gaston was preparing to leave and I did not want his evening to end on a negative note so I made a point of exchanging a few pleasantries with him and promised to get together soon for a coffee.

  The city had placed park benches on the street and I led Ben over to one of them so we could talk.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. ‘What did he say that made
you lose your cool? You must have known that that imbecile would give your book a bad review sooner or later. You know that he has a special hard-on for Montreal authors who are better novelists than he is – which is to say, all of you.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ben replied, still shaking with anger. ‘But this time he’s gone too far. In his review he says something like “if my impotence as a writer carries over to the bedroom he feels sorry for my wife”. He’s crossed a line, bringing Monique into this. I swear to God, if he says anything about her I’ll tear his face off!’

  ‘Ben,’ I said placing a calming hand on his forearm, ‘you know you don’t mean that. And it isn’t smart to make murder threats in front of a homicide detective.’

  Chapter 2

  I’m a sound sleeper and usually wake up refreshed. Thursday morning was an exception. I was wide awake and it was only six o’clock – at least an hour ahead of my normal wake-up time. This was due to the fact that I could not get the unpleasantness with Elias out of my mind. I consider it my job to ensure that any author who has an event at Dickens & Compagnie enjoys it, so it upsets me when a shithead like Elias tries to ruin it. And my feelings of dismay were doubled in this case because the writer in question was my best friend.

  I decided to take advantage of the early hour and go out for a run on the mountain in the hope that the exertion would alleviate my bad mood. I changed into my running shoes, T-shirt and shorts and headed out the door. I normally pace myself for an eight- or nine-kilometre run to the cross on the top of Mount Royal, which takes in the neighbourhood of an hour. However, this morning I decided to push myself and get the endorphins flowing as quickly as possible. Running at a much faster pace than I normally do but over a shorter distance, I ended up back home winded, but no less angry about the previous night’s events.

  I decided to take a direct approach and call Agnes Baker, the owner of Reflection and Elias’s boss. In spite of how I felt about Dornal, Agnes and I had always been able to get along and that’s why I decided, even though it was on the early side, to speak to her. I didn’t care if I woke her up. I wanted to talk to her about her employee and make her understand that his behaviour was totally unprofessional. I’ve been in the book business for a long time and I understand perfectly that it is a reviewer’s job to provide an honest assessment of the book they are reviewing. There were many occasions that a book I thought was terrific received a bad review, but that’s just the way things are; not everyone can agree on everything. But Elias went beyond writing a critical but fair review of Ben’s book -– he was insulting. In my opinion, that is a dishonest approach to evaluating books and has no place in our business. I wanted to talk to Agnes, who I knew to be fair, to make her understand that she had an obligation to ensure that Dornal acted in a professional and responsible fashion.