Middlemen

Fast-paced, with action, violence, and suspense, but the author takes time to paint each scene fully, with details in the background and foreground, with action and nuances of conversation … A highly satisfying read.

* Miramichi Reader *

With each MacNeice book, Scott Thornley takes the reader deeper into the forest of the human soul. These are, yes, detective stories, but they are also novels about a detective. For MacNeice, nearly every action undertaken in pursuit of perpetrators of horrible murders opens up vistas: of his psyche; of his love for his late wife with whom he periodically communicates; of sentient nature, dogs, birds, actual forests; and of the explicable and inexplicable in the always-slightly-glimpsed souls of his colleagues and of each criminal, down to every minor character whether a caring nurse or a gangster’s stooge. In this, Thornley’s writing is virtuoso, as it also is in his descriptions of modern technology, forensics, and the crimes themselves which are described with such hyper-realism that they seem almost dreamlike. Would that they were. These horrors are what the human mind is capable of devising and, sometimes, of doing. Thornley uses poetry well—“well” means near-invisibly—to handle soul-unknowables. One killer says, “Shuffle the letters of veil and you have evil.” The motor of detective fiction is cause-and-effect. Thornley honours that in his intricate puzzle of a plot, then goes on to depict, character by character, cause-and-effect as the least of it. That is the mark of memorable literature. Middlemen is literature

* Richard W. Halperin, poet *

Executed bodies and disappeared chaps, both rich and hench-level, keep things hopping for rogue homicide cop MacNiece … A strange but entertaining story.

* Winnipeg Free Pre