[Nothing in The Eiger Sanction and The Loo Sanction] could have prepared the aficionado for what we have here [in The Main]. In those books, he showed a more-than-readable style, a good eye for the amusingly grotesque and a taste for the kind of impending horror; the kind of tantalizing unanswered questions that make people read fast and wait for the next book.

Strictly speaking, The Main is not impossibly removed from those precedents; if it must be put in a pigeonhole, it is a highly professional police-procedural murder mystery set in Montreal's immigrant district—an area like New York's Lower East Side in an earlier generation. It rises from this pigeon-hole because the author writes extremely well and because his sharply tuned sense of character and milieu gives the book a vivid life granted to only the finest of "serious" fiction.

At the center of the novel...