Snow Job

In bestselling Deverell’s latest hilarious mystery, Arthur Beauchamp moves to Ottawa, and all hell breaks loose Arthur Beauchamp has followed his wife, the leader and first elected member of the Green Party, to Ottawa. But he hates it there: the cold, the politics, and his place in his wife’s shadow. So when a delegation of government officials from Bhashyistan is blown sky high on Bronson Avenue and the shares of a Calgary-based oil company promptly drop like a stone, Arthur is only too happy to jump to the defence of the missing suspected assassin. Deverell’s latest Arthur Beauchamp novel cranks the wily old lawyer’s adventures up several notches, and then some. It’s wildly imaginative, utterly Canadian, and irresistibly funny. From the Hardcover edition.From Publishers WeeklyIn Arthur Ellis Award–winner Deverell's rambling third novel to feature crafty lawyer Arthur Beauchamp (after 2008's Kill All the Judges), Igor Muckhali Ivanovich (aka Mad Igor), the dictator of the People's Republic of Bhashyistan (formerly part of the U.S.S.R.), declares war on Canada after a diplomatic delegation from the Central Asian nation is blown to bits while visiting Ottawa. Beauchamp and CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) agent Ray DiPalma (the shape-shifting spy who never came in from the cold) go to Albania, where kidnappers have taken Arthur's client, Abzal Erzhan, the prime suspect in the terrorist incident. The Canadian political satire may be of less interest to U.S. readers than a subplot involving three Saskatchewan women who go AWOL from a tour of Bhashyistan during the conflict. The journal extracts written by one of them about the three finding shelter with the Bhashyistani Democratic Revolutionary Front have a sharp focus the main plot lacks. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Review"Smart, beautifully written, and really, really funny satire featuring Arthur Beauchamp, one of Canadian crime fiction's truly original characters. The best novel by Deverell ever." — Margaret Cannon, *Globe and Mail "Though the story is dead serious at its heart, Deverell has much material that is as funny as anything he's written." — Toronto Star "Fine writing and tongue-in-cheek delivery with acid shots at our political circus, and so close to reality that it seems even funnier. A must-read." — Hamilton Spectator"Deverell's imagination gets high marks for postulating what happens when an obscure country declares war on Canada." — Quill & Quire* From the Hardcover edition.