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Toronto likes to think of itself as a “world-class city,’’ and at least in terms of crime and crime fiction, it’s not that far off. One illustration: John McFetridge’s Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, an absorbingly complex tale... There are wheels within wheels, plots within plots, betrayals within betrayals — along with confusions and hopes.
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is set in today's Toronto -- not the Toronto of 1969 when Neil Young wrote the song the title references.
A time-worn apartment building in Parkdale is the setting; a hooker and her customer start the action when an unexpected visitor hits the windshield of the car they're conducting business in.
Did the uninvited guest jump or was he pushed? Is he connected to the 1,000-plant grow-op that Detective Gord Bergeron and his Ojibwa partner, Armstrong, discover on their search?
The connections continue -- the detectives learn that the dead man is Iranian, that 9/11-style terrorists live in the building and that the trail leads them to massage parlours, Mafia-run clubs and corruption in the police ranks. A marijuana distributor in the building is forced to seek a new supply source to keep her upmarket escort clients happy.
Keeping track of the plot proves that a policeman's lot is not an easy or simple one. But author McFetridge marshals his clues and drives the reader into the raw reality that the new Toronto has a burgeoning crime problem.
Convincing atmospheric writing is the key to this novel. You're in the back seat of the cop car as the discoveries are made, the failures and the fraud unearthed and the realities exposed.
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere is a fine summer read and has changed my time-honoured image of Toronto the Good.
Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
By John McFetridge
(ECW Press, $24.95)
