MACKEREL SKY

The American debut of Canadian novelist and poet Caple is a Montreal-set thriller about the rise and fall of a family of counterfeiters.

Guy Vidoq’s family, if not exactly mobsters, have traditionally stood on the wrong side of the law: Guy’s father, for example, made a living by smuggling illegal aliens into Canada and the US. Guy himself is more retiring than his forebears and has lived quietly for the last 20 years in Boston, where he fled as a 16-year-old to escape his older girlfriend Martine (who had just given birth to his daughter Isabelle). Now Guy has come back to Montreal to meet Isabelle for the first time and reestablish relations with Martine, who, for the past five years, has been living with her 22-year-old lover, Harry. With the exception of Harry, who hates him on first sight, the reunion goes pretty well: Guy hits it off with Isabelle from the start, and he’s promptly seduced by Martine, whose proclivity for making love in trees or parking lots may be a signal of something that’s lost on Guy. As he recuperates from the broken foot he earned in one of Martine’s trysts, he comes to depend increasingly upon Isabelle, who soon cheerfully describes to him the counterfeiting business she and her mother run with Harry. Shocked and fearful for his daughter’s safety, Guy tries to convince the two to give up the scam, but instead he’s drawn into it himself. There’ll be two pairs of hit-men (one gay, one straight), an annual shipment nearing its deadline, a half-comic bank robbery with bizarre and deadly consequences, and a secluded hotel on the Ile d’Orleans—all of these impinging upon Guy and his family to create a great deal of trouble in the end.

A black-tinged caper narrated nicely in quick short chapters that waste little time in setting scenes as they move the tale along.