HIGH ON SHRIER

By Lesley McAllister, NOW Magazine

Toronto author Howard Shrier’s High Chicago took the prize at this year’s Arthur Ellis Awards for excellence in Canadian crime writing. And you can see why. Shrier, who counts crime reporter and comedy writer among his accomplishments, writes with an easy assurance and a killer sense of humour.

This is the second book in his series featuring Toronto private investigator Jonah Geller. A departure from soft-boiled Jewish shamuses like Howard Engel’s Benny Cooperman, Geller is street smart, fit and fearless, with a less than squeaky-clean past and a penchant for stepping up when needed.

The P.I. has recently opened his own agency, the enigmatically named World Repairs, with his best friend, Jenn Raudsepp, a stunning, wisecracking lesbian. Business is slow and the rent is due when he’s hired to find out why a young woman seemingly jumped to her death from her university residence.
Bodies start to pile up, and the blood trail leads Geller to a neglected parcel of land on Toronto’s waterfront and a high-flying Chicago real estate developer.

One of the best things about Shrier’s mysteries is that they eat, sleep and breathe Toronto. It’s rare, and refreshing, to see the city portrayed so perfectly on the page. And this is the real Toronto, with all its bruises and blemishes.

High Chicago is a great addition to the mystery shelf. Jonah Geller is the kind of wise, justice-seeking guy you can’t resist, and his relationship with his gay partner gives a nice contemporary – and often funny – twist to the genre. Nick and Nora they ain’t.

Let’s hope there’s a new Geller in the works; the world could do with a bit more of the Jewish idea of tikkun olam, or “repairing the world.”

Rating: NNNN (out of 5)

Howard Shrier’s second novel, High Chicago, is even better than his award winning debut.

Toronto investigator Jonah Geller becomes convinced a suicide is murder linked to the upmarket construction of a piece of Toronto’s old waterfront. But the evidence is insufficient for the police to act. The suspect, the victim’s father’s business partner, is eliminating everything that gets in his way.

High Chicago is rich in action and dialogue. It’s skillfully plotted and bold with a firm yet compassionate voice.

High Chicago confirms Shrier as an author to watch for, both in Canada and abroad. It’s a mystery that peels away the urban layers of big business civlity to expose the raw flesh of reality underneath.

Howard Shrier’s debut novel, Buffalo Jump, was a strong beginning for the Toronto writer, and I suggested at the time that readers would want to keep an eye out for its sequel.  Turned out, that was an understatement....Combining fast-paced action with well-structured plots, and featuring a complex but likeable protagonist, Shrier’s novels are fast winning him legions of loyal fans.  If you enjoy contemporary hard-boiled tales with nuanced characters, check out High Chicago; you won’t be disappointed.

Howard Shrier’s first novel, Buffalo Jump, won the Arthur Ellis Award for best first novel. High Chicago, his second, will definitely be short-listed for another. It’s got the same stellar characters, the same clever plotting, and, if anything, an even better story.

If you missed Buffalo Jump, you might not know that investigator Jonah Geller, of Toronto, nearly died. He has left his very lucrative job at Beacon Security and opened his own small investigative shop, which he calls World Repairs. He may not be able to solve the world’s biggest problems, but he’s willing to try on the small stuff. That, Jonah believes, is where the interesting work is to be found.

Jonah and his partner, Jenn Raudsepp, are hired to investigate the suicide of a young woman. It seems simple enough, but the case leads Jonah into the very high-stakes construction business, and particularly a large development on the Toronto waterfront. From there, it’s a quick skip to murder and a trip to Chicago, to uncover the past and present of a rich and powerful man who seems to be able to order the death of anyone who gets in his way.

Dialogue so sharp you could cut your tongue on it. That’s what makes this second novel by Howard Shrier so appealing. His fictional gumshoe Jonah Geller needs to solve the problem of a young girl who apparently committed suicide by leaping from the balcony of a high rise apartment. He’s not so sure the girl did herself in — it may have been a murder.

Geller, who runs an agency called World Repairs — a silly name for a investigation agency — also uncovers some serious hanky panky around a massive development on the Toronto waterfront. Most of the questions lead back to a developer living in Chicago. So Geller makes a visit. Almost immediately, someone tries to kill him. He guesses he must be on the right track. The developer, Simon Bird, is in business with the dead girl’s father. Geller eventually figures all of it out, but not before more violence and death.

Shrier is a former crime reporter for a Montreal newspaper who now lives in Toronto. His first novel was called Buffalo Jump.

High Chicago blends mystery, suspense
By Shlomo Schwartzberg, September 10, 2009

Howard Shrier’s second novel, High Chicago, again features the Toronto-based Jewish detective Jonah Geller.  It ups the ante from his previous novel in terms of the forces Jonah is confronting, but more significantly in terms of the damage the world ends up inflicting on him.

Whereas Shrier’s award-winning debut novel Buffalo Jump dealt as much with Canadian pharmaceuticals being smuggled into the United States as it did with murder, High Chicago (Vintage Canada) begins with a request to investigate the suicide of a young woman, Maya Cantor. It is a case Jonah soon suspects is actually a homicide.

Maya’s death is followed by two more mysterious deaths, a highly disturbing situation, and one that is tied to a dangerously polluted highrise development that is being erected in Toronto’s Harbourfront area.

All this eventually pits Jonah against Simon Birk, a ruthless Donald Trump- like Chicago real estate mogul whom Jonah is determined to bring down. But he has no evidence implicating Simon in any crime, so he sets off for Chicago in hopes of finding a way to expose the man.

Former hit man Dante Ryan, whom Jonah befriended in Buffalo Jump, also finds his way to the Windy City, as does Jenn Raudsepp, Jonah’s new partner in his recently set up detective agency. Called World Repairs, it is a translation of tikkun olam, the Jewish concept of “repairing the world” and making it a better place.

In Buffalo Jump, Jonah was still somewhat idealistic despite witnessing his girlfriend die in a terrorist attack in Israel, and stubbornly clung to the belief that he could make a difference as a private investigator. In High Chicago, those ideals are completely tarnished as Jonah realizes he can only defeat Simon by operating outside the confines of the law.

In that regard, Shrier has structured this book very differently from Buffalo Jump, which was a cleverly plotted mystery that took a roundabout, unpredictable route to its exciting resolution.

High Chicago, like Simon Birk himself, is blunt and tough, and does not attempt to disguise (most of) its mysteries. That seems like a flaw at first, but Shrier is too good a writer not to be doing this on purpose.

Chicago is after all much bigger than Buffalo, so its challenges would naturally be more overwhelming for Jonah.

High Chicago fascinates because one can feel how overmatched Jonah is and thus wonder how and if he’ll come out of this adventure in one piece. Add to that Shrier’s wry and witty observations on Chicago’s superior waterfront area and architecture, which is immediately apparent to anyone who has ever visited the city, and you end up with a gripping second novel that’s not at all like his first.

The book has its flaws, with a plot that occasionally strains credulity, notably during the climax, and Shrier’s tendency to indicate which streets all the action takes place on gets annoying, but he doesn’t repeat himself or fail to deepen his main character.

On the other hand, Jonah grows in stature and complexity and thus becomes more interesting.

With High Chicago, Shrier cements his reputation as a fine mystery writer. I suspect and hope that he and Jonah will be around for a long time to come

If you’re like me the first mystery that needs solving about mystery novels is who actually reads them? There’s this huge market for them and they always contain the same things: a gruesomely engrossing premise that hooks the reader, a detective with a chip on his or her shoulder, a flirtation with a tough-as-nails superior officer, lots of red herring suspects and a final surprise twist. And while you’d think the public would tire of the format, the opposite is the case.

I haven’t been following the career of Toronto investigator Jonah Geller so, for me, “High Chicago” is kind of like reading his blog. Apparently he’s opened his own agency and is investigating the suicide of a young woman and how it’s connected to a construction deal near the city’s waterfront. After that I can’t tell you what happens because the book’s publisher would put me in cement shoes if I did.

What I can tell you is that what’s on the page is easy to read, the pace is friendly on the brain, and the characters’ motivations always make sense (bonus points for some surprising character nuance and quirk). I’m sure it’s enough for the faithful reader-clients of Mr. Geller and the market for these books will remain strong. Suffice to say that as far as mysteries go, “High Chicago” has a lot going for it. Is it literature-lite? Of course. Is it genre-friendly? Yes, it is. And those are all good things. The book is proof that people are investing time and effort in characters; that in our internet age good mysteries are keeping them reading books at all.

A follow-up to the successful Buffalo Jump, High Chicago continues the adventures of Toronto private detective Jonah Geller. The setting is Toronto, the plot hinges on the development of the long-neglected waterfront. What could be more local than that? Shrier is one of the most exciting new voices in the mystery genre. This sophomore effort is sure to please. 

Tikkun olam. It’s a Hebrew phrase that translates roughly to “making the world a better place,” and an expression that nearly ended up on Jonah Geller’s newly hung shingle in Toronto. Last year, Shrier won an Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada for Buffalo Jump, his memorable introduction of Geller, a Jewish P. I. This followup finds Geller and his partner, Jenn Raudsepp, chasing down a high-flying real estate tycoon in the Second City after the bodies start stacking up in the Big Smoke. It’s a more than worthy sequel, with an intriguing plot, a wicked sense of humour and masterfully managed dialogue. You might even say that Shrier is making the world of crime fiction a better place, one Jonah Geller mystery at a time.

Howard Shrier starts with the canvas of a crackling good mystery, then paints a compelling portrait of modern secular Jewish life complete with its wisdom, contradictions, and abiding humor.  High Chicago is often funny, sometimes violent, and always thoughtful, with a powerful sense of place throughout.  Toronto may have just found its Spenser in PI Jonah Geller, and I can’t wait for his next case.

A plot brimming with greed, deceit, violence and murder makes High Chicago a fast-paced, entertaining read.

Back in North America, there are new entries in several excellent Canadian series. 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. 

Buffalo Jump offers funny and fresh takes on the private-eye novel and not-so-funny trips into scary moral territory. The novel is set near the Canada-United States border and crosses that border to tell a pair of stories that converge to pack a tough and thoroughly contemporary punch.

Canadian author Howard Shrier’s first novel, Buffalo Jump, is a winner.

Pop quiz for all Canadian mystery fans: name the creator (hint: first name Howard) of a fictional Jewish private investigator based in southern Ontario.  If you said Howard Engel, it would be under-standable.  One of Canada’s best-loved crime writers (and member of the Order of Canada), Engel has regaled readers for decades with the exploits of his loveable schmuck Benny Cooperman, a PI located in the fictional town of Grantham, Ontario.  However, there’s a new Howard on the horizon, and his protagonist bears only a passing resem-blance to Engel’s creation.  No schmuck, he is tougher, slightly grittier, and strictly a big-city sleuth; he is, in fact, a Cooperman for the new millennium.

Born and raised in Montreal, Howard Shrier graduated with honours in journalism and creative writing from Concordia University.  He has worked as a crime reporter and as a writer for the radio news, as well as in theatre and television, and as a senior communi-cations advisor to various government agencies.
Howard lives with his wife and sons in Toronto where, admitting to a certain fondness for single malts, he writes above a bar and café in Toronto’s Annex neighborhood.

Ex-Israeli soldier and Toronto private investigator Jonah Geller is not having an especially good year.  He’s recover-ing from having been shot when a tobacco-smuggling case he was working went wrong, getting a good cop para-lyzed in the process.  His girlfriend walked out on him while he was still in the hospital, and his boss has put him on probation until he can demonstrate that he’s up to the job.

Just when Jonah thought things couldn’t get worse, Dante Ryan, a hit man for the mobster he failed to put away, approaches Geller with an offer he can’t refuse: he wants Jonah to take him on as a client.

Geller is not one to take a challenge lightly.  He could, of course, simply refuse the case.  Or could he?  It turns out that the killer has been given a contract he doesn’t want to fulfill: it involves killing a man and his wife and child.  It goes against the hit man’s own code of ethics—you read right—and he wants to know who ordered the hit, and why.  If Geller takes the case, he might just be able to prevent the killings from taking place, and beneath all the tough-guy persona, Jonah Geller is a deeply moral man.

At the same time, an office colleague, François Paradis, asks for Geller’s help.  The mother of a client has died recently in Meadowvale, a local nursing home, and the client wonders whether someone there was at fault.  Sidelined from bigger cases, his career pretty much on hold, Geller agrees to help.
At first things seem simple enough.  He runs a background check on the Meadowvale and it comes up clean.  But when he and a colleague visit the facility under the guise of looking to place their mother there, and are unmasked, they encounter a burly man with a gun and are forced to flee for their lives.
Meanwhile, Geller’s investigation into the hit man’s target seems to have stalled.  The man is a respected member of the community, with an upmarket home and the sole owner of a thriving pharmacy.  Why would anyone want his entire family killed?

In nearby Buffalo the drug business operates on a whole different level.  Barry Aiken, one of life’s failures living on the edge of despair, is dependent on a black-market dealer for affordable meds.  When he arrives at the dealer’s house and finds him dead, Barry’s first thought is to panic.  Unfortunately, he goes with his second thought, which is to scoop up all the drugs he can, take them home, and sell them to his friends.  His dealer’s death will be Barry’s own ticket out of poverty.  A great idea, if only the killer wasn’t just outside, watching Barry’s every move.

A conscientious man, Jonah Geller works the nursing-home case while he tries to discover who would want an innocuous pharmacist dead.  Of course, he has to keep the latter case to himself; not only is he in disgrace with his boss for mishandling the tobacco-smuggling case, but having a hit man for a client isn’t exactly the sort of thing you can tell your boss—or the police—about.  Geller is forced, then, to walk a tortuous path between the law, loyalty to his boss, and his own code of ethics as he tries to solve these puzzles.  That path will lead to attacks on innocent bystanders, Geller himself, and more than one death before things are finally sorted.

My Recommendation
Buffalo Jump has a definite Neo-Noir flavour, combining tough-guy action, snappy dialogue, and a flawed prota-gonist, set against a gritty background.  The justice is cosmic, rather than legal, with Geller taking matters into his own hands, and although the tone of the story is permeated by a jaded outlook, it is still grounded in a strong sense of right and wrong.  Nicely-paced, the action is inter-spersed with a strong backstory fleshing out Jonah Geller’s conflicted past and making him both a believable and a sympathetic character.  Buffalo Jump is a fine debut novel, and readers will want to keep an eye out for its sequel, High Chicago, which is slated for publication in 2009.

When a grieving mother comes to Toronto private investigator Jonah Geller wanting to find answers about her daughter’s alleged suicide, this story takes off and never stops. Jonah and his sidekicks discover the dirty business going on in the high stakes world of waterfront construction.

The story starts in Toronto but halfway moves to Chicago where Jonah finds he has bitten off more than he can chew, and needs his friend, former hit man Dante Ryan, and his partner, beautiful Jenn Raudsepp, to help him.

This is the first Howard Shrier novel I have read but it won’t be the last. It is the second in the series featuring the private investigator Jonah Geller, the first being a novel called Buffalo Jump. There are some incidents alluded to in High Chicago that I am guessing are in the first book.

The things I admire the most about High Chicago is the development of good strong characters...Jonah is a guy I wouldn’t mind watching my back (he is as good as Parker’s Spencer) and I really liked the secondary characters Dante and Jenn. In fact, to me they have been developed as well or better than Parker’s. There is no doubt that Shrier will be compared to Robert Parker. There are a lot of similarities and someone looking for that style won’t be disappointed.

Setting was nicely drawn too. I’ve never been to Chicago but almost felt like I had after I read this book. However, if you’re afraid of heights, it may make you a little nervous at times...it’s not called High Chicago for nothing! There are not a lot of surprises in this book...the bad guys are obvious from the start, with the possible exception of one. However, that doesn’t seem to matter.  It ‘s all about how one deals with a villain who seems untouchable.  Plus, there is plenty of physical action and some great dialogue.

On the whole, I really enjoyed this book and will probably read Buffalo Jump and also any future offerings by Shrier if they are this good. 

Howard Shrier has written his first novel, Buffalo Jump ($19.95) and it’s a winner. Part of the charm of the novel, of course, is that it is set in Toronto. Though this can be a double edged sword—always looking for mistakes of fact or geography, and, fortunately, there were none of any significance—it’s great fun to read a novel set in the city. Howard writes with a deft, witty touch and our hero, Jonah Geller has lots of Jewish wit and wisdom to relate.

Shrier’s gritty yet vibrant Toronto makes the perfect backdrop for a crime story that is both thrilling and thoughtful.

Buffalo Jump jumps right off the page. It’s a barrelling freight train of a mystery and I can’t wait for Jonah Geller’s next case.

Jonah Geller would not call himself a nice Jewish boy. He never finished college, he works as a private detective for an agency that largely does surveillance work, he likes ham and eggs for breakfast and doesn’t call his mother enough. He suffers from intense and troubling nightmares about his service in the Israeli army, as a result of which he has a profound reluctance to fire a gun.

When Dante Ryan, notorious contract killer working for mob boss Marco Di Pietra, turns up in Jonah’s kitchen uninvited, Jonah expects the worst. Instead, Ryan asks for Geller’s help. He has been landed with a contract assignment he doesn’t want to fulfill - to wipe out an entire Toronto family, down to the five-year-old son - and Dante, who also has a little boy, can’t bring himself to do it. If he doesn’t, however, he will be dead meat. So he wants Jonah to find out who really wants the family dead and why. Perhaps then he can get some kind of leverage that will at least spare the child.

Jonah is none too happy about any of this. He is, after all, still recuperating from a gunshot wound received in his last, unhappy, encounter with Ryan and his boss. But his early religious instruction kicks in. The responsibility to repair the world, tikkun olam, is one he takes very seriously. Much as he would prefer a quiet life, he cannot ignore Ryan’s appeal for help.

The two are unlikely partners and one of the pleasures of this book is observing how each affects the other. It’s an edgy relationship, certainly - Dante has killed a lot of people and is touchy about being reminded of it - and Jonah has a smart mouth. By the end, however, each has changed in response to the other, though happily there is nothing sentimental about the transformation.

This is a first novel and could have done with a little editing, as can most first novels. It is surprisingly sure-footed all the same. Jonah Geller has a strong and individual voice, the plot elements are handled with assurance and, even though the body count is rather high, they all get dead in credible ways. The Toronto of this book will not bring back any of the tourists the high Canadian dollar has discouraged, but it is a city with a strong personality of its own.

There has as yet been no promise of further adventures of Jonah Geller, though the possibility is certainly present at the end. I do hope to see him in the very near future. He is contemporary, appealing, and fresh in several senses of the word. 

Blunt action, realistically and graphically described and paced with just enough time to catch your breath before the next sudden eruption. Add the right feel for dialogue, a plot and writing that’s just the ideal temperature for a mystery-thriller and you have Buffalo Jump–a debut novel winner by Howard Shrier.

Toronto PI Jonah Geller arrives home prepared to nurse his wounds, emotional and physical, with booze and pain pills. There to help is a contract killer with a deal he can’t refuse–help me and you go on living, don’t help me and…

The killer has been ordered to kill an entire family–husband, wife and child. The husband, that’s the nature of the business. The wife, perhaps collateral damage. But the child is a different matter. Geller’s job is to find out the identity of the contractor.

A scheme to supply Americans with cheaper, life-saving Canadian drugs, a conflict within an organized crime family and Geller’s capacity to attract trouble and annoy his Jewish mother and the local police creates a strangely enduring bond between PI and contract killer.

The result is a debut novel with a well-juggled storyline brimming with dry humour, a cast of oddball characters, and graphic scenes that come alive with action. A must-read for summer.

A cast of compelling oddballs; a complex, funny and always surprising hero and a plot as fresh and twisty as yesterday’s headlines–Shrier juggles them all and nails his first crime novel with the aplomb and impact of a seasoned pro. A completely satisfying read that made me wish Jonah Geller could work cases on my shows.

Jonah Geller is a man with many troubles. His wife has just kicked him out of their home and he has screwed up a major smuggling case in his role as security officer for a Toronto company.

So after recuperating from a gunshot wound, Geller finds himself doing minor jobs for the security firm. And he’s shocked when a notorious mob killer called Dante Ryan breaks into his apartment.

Ryan wants Geller’s help in tracking down the person who ordered a mob hit on a druggist, his wife and five-year-old son. Seems an illegal pill route into Buffalo for Canadian drugs is causing trouble in the world of organized crime.

What follows is ferocious action as Ryan and Geller attempt to hunt down the perpetrators, or “perps” as the police call them.

This first book by Shrier is top-notch, a page-turner to rate with the best of them and with some memorable characters. It also contains just the right dose of cynicism and dark humour, both of which mark the best of the private-eye novels.

Contemporary Canadian crime writers are not exactly plentiful in number, and Toronto’s Howard Shrier is a welcome addition to their ranks. Shrier, a former broadcaster, knows his way around genre conventions: his protagonist, detective Jonah Geller, cracks wise at every opportunity about his tenuous employment with investigative firm Beacon Security and his slippery hold on relationships with women. Geller has tasked himself with “repairing the world, one asshole at a time.” He gets into a heap of trouble with his sidekick, a reluctant hitman, frequently ending up bloodied and bruised.

But Shrier adds welcome flourishes. Geller’s exploration of his Jewishness imbues the book with extra depth and resonance. Hitman Dante Ryan’s reason for teaming up with Geller – an outright refusal to kill his client’s child – has the whiff of contrivance, but becomes believable as the sparring duo conduct a clandestine investigation into cross-border pharmaceutical smuggling that also ties into one of Geller’s past cases.

Though the book’s first 50 pages are full of unnecessary expository baggage, the final pages roar with plot twists and devastating consequences. Geller is changed by the violence that occurs, all of it a result of greed mixed with sociopathic ambition.

Buffalo Jump (a code word for a smuggling trip to and from the upstate New York city) doesn’t break new ground, but it does introduce a strong, clear voice with a wry sense of humour. Geller’s description of a co-worker as having “the computer skills of an early hominid” or his belief that “one should never commit one’s premeditated murder without a nutritious breakfast” continue the tradition of Robert B. Parker and Robert Crais with a hearty and promising Maple Leaf twist.

Buffalo Jump is a great debut novel from Montreal-born Torontonian Shrier, and it introduces PI Jonah Geller in what is certainly going to be a fine series. The plot is tight, the characters engaging, and this one even has a believable - and sympathetic - bad guy.

The story opens with Geller, a consultant with Beacon Security in Toronto, having a really bad day. First, there’s the nightmare that kept him up all night. Also, his arm isn’t completely healed from the bullet that went through it during a job that he screwed up royally. His car won’t start and, on the TTC ride to Beacon, he’s accosted by an anti-Semitic bully. All that before 8:30 a.m.

This is a clever background for a complex character, one about to be hired on a unique job. That evening, as Geller returns to his apartment, a contract killer named Dante Ryan is waiting. Ryan has been hired to kill a pharmacist. But the unknown person who hired him also wants him to take out the pharmacist’s wife and five-year-old son. It seems even a hired killer has scruples. Ryan wants Geller to get him the information he needs to get the deal cancelled.

This clever device leads Geller into the crime world of Toronto’s Golden Horseshoe, down to depressed Buffalo and back. It also opens up the festering wound of his failure in what Beacon Security calls The Tobacco Debacle, where Geller was shot. This is a terrific opening to what is sure to become a solid series.

Guns, knives, bats, and the Don. Welcome to the menacing world of Howard Shrier’s Toronto! Welcome to Buffalo Jump. There’s even a Mafia Don or two thrown in, to balance out the threat of the river.

Jonah Geller is a nice Jewish boy who can’t seem to live up to the promise his mother sees in him. A licensed private investigator with Beacon Security, he has had a few too many run-ins with other guys’ fists for her taste. But Jonah is good at what he does. Or he was until that Ensign case.

So why is Dante Ryan, mob assassin, showing up everywhere Jonah goes? And what does the death of an old lady in a nursing home have to do with a mob hit on an entire family—father, mother and five-year-old son? Jonah will find out, even if it takes everything his fists and wits can muster.

This one is not for the faint of heart, or for those who like their murders nice and tidy.  But if you are looking for a blood-soaked PI thriller that does not shy away from the ethical complications of violence in a violent world, Jonah Geller might just be the investigator for you. Follow this one up with High Chicago, Shrier’s second Geller novel.