Ice Lake (60 page)
Muddied, Sally was circling the yard, wanting to play. Lucy found a stick, a branch that had come down during the last storm, gave it a good long toss, and the dog took off. They watched Sally run, then scamper back with the stick, and Cinq-Mars put his arm around his wife’s shoulders. The dog begged Lucy to throw it again, and she teased the animal, feinting in various directions before lofting her precious stick high and far. Emile Cinq-Mars and Sandra watched as the young woman entertained the dog, and Sandra frequently shot a glance at her husband, noticing his red eyes.
Cinq-Mars smiled a couple of times when Lucy laughed. She was recovering from her trauma, but she had also educated them all concerning the gravity of the ongoing situation. She told them that
Darkling Star
could teach other firms the technique to accelerate an illness in order to track, isolate, and comprehend its progress. A pharmaceutical firm had already reported that they’d been approached. So the mob was out there, getting into a new business, offering death for sale, and the possibility was very real that soon someone might buy for the sake of the knowledge they’d gain.
Death had been put up on the auction block.
Cinq-Mars was sufficiently knowledgeable about humankind to know there would be bidders.
He whispered to Sandra, “Dad’s gone.”
And he wept then. His body shook. She put an arm around him. While the dog and the young woman played, while the horses lifted their heads and snorted, while the breeze prevailed, warm and brisk, Sandra and Emile Cinq-Mars turned and held one another in their arms, in the peace of their barnyard, silently, and they remained clasped, long after Lucy had taken the dog inside to leave them to their private sorrow.
PRAISE FOR
CITY OF ICE
Rich descriptions of Montreal in winter … blend well with the bone-chilling plot …
THE NEW YORK TIMES
John Farrow has written a tour de force … in terms of popular genre fiction, [this] might be the best book ever produced in Canada.
THE VANCOUVER SUN
[It] has a heart pounding with crime, sleaze, and venom. And intrigue, greed, and betrayal mark the boundaries of this thumping story.
NATIONAL POST
Farrow, who admires the morally complex thrillers of John Le Carré and Martin Cruz Smith
(Gorky Park),
achieves much the same high ground.
MACLEAN’S
… Farrow’s Montreal is a dirty old town, and
City of Ice
is as noir as it gets; noir with a hard glaze of frost, unforgiving as January.
THE GAZETTE
(Montreal)
City of Ice
may be a thriller, but it’s one with more than a little literary skill behind it. You won’t find any breathless prose in Farrow’s fast-paced book. Instead the writing is seamless, the plotting intricate, and the characterization generally first-class.
THE EDMONTON JOURNAL
Farrow’s novel has enough grit to satisfy fans of the genre and enough intelligence to be a welcome addition to the ongoing exploration of Canada’s solitudes in the context of a changing world.
QUILL & QUIRE
About the Author
JOHN FARROW is the pen name of Trevor Ferguson, who has written nine novels and four plays and has been named Canada’s best novelist in both
Books in Canada
and the
Toronto Star
. Under the name John Farrow, he has written three novels featuring Emile Cinq-Mars:
City of Ice Lake,
and his most recent book,
River City.
He was raised in Montreal and lives in Hudson, Quebec.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
Ice Lake
Copyright © 2001 by John Farrow Mysteries, Inc. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Epub Edition © July 2011 ISBN: 978-1-443-40876-9
Published by Harper Weekend, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
First published in hardcover by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd: 2001
First mass market paperback edition: 2002
This Harper Weekend trade paperback edition: 2011
HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
2 Bloor Street East, 20th Floor
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4W 1A8
www.harpercollins.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication information
Farrow, John, 1947-
Ice Lake/John Farrow.
Originally publ.: 2001.
ISBN 978-1-44340-529-4
I. Title.
PS8561.A785I23 2011 C813’.54 C2011-902422-5
RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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