Retired Detective Kevin Beldon has left Ottawa and gone into retreat at a Buddhist monastery in California following his successful treatment for lung cancer. He’s trying to make sense of his life, but death is very much on his mind. And not just his own; he’s still trying to come to terms with the loss ten years earlier of his wife and son, victims of Dr. Ewan Randome, an evil mastermind whom Beldon had been forced to let escape. Aside from providing the occasional consultation for the California police, Beldon has happily gone into retirement, but when Global Patrol, the international police force, comes looking for his help on the Malachai case, a serial killer investigation that has them stymied, his interest is piqued. Beldon quickly deduces that the killings are related to his last unsolved case before his retirement two years earlier, a triple murder in his nation’s capital, and hesuspects the involvement of his old nemesis Dr. Randome in this new round of assassinations. As events unfold, Beldon comes to realize how inevitable it was that Malachai’s killing spree would end in New York, and how inevitable his own final showdown with Randome has always been.
Kevin Beldon was thinking about death, his own. In a million years he would never have believed that he’d return to California’s Point Conception Zen Centre to think about that. Like most of the uninitiated, he’d assumed that the trick in meditating wasto discipline the brain not to think, or to think nothing. That hope had been the big attraction of the monk’s life. Kevin had a lot not to think about, especially a number of deaths. Yet here he was, as per Jaken’s instructions, thinking about death, his own.
“Look at you!” Jaken had said two years earlier when Kevin returned from investigating the triple murder on Parliament Hill back home in Ottawa. “Why are you trying so hard to kill yourself, Kevin Beldon? Are you so in love with death, with your little cigars and big crime? ... Yes? Then tell me what death is!”
“I feel like I’m dying, Jaken.”
“Don’t feel, Beldon-san—think.” He tapped his temple.
He still missed his small Dutch cigars, his Panters, like a dear old dead friend. Like dear dead Cynthia, his wife, who had run away with him once upon a time from a boring high-school field trip, and he’d fallen in love forever. Or like Owen, hismurdered son. Kelly of course and Abiki Ali, her husband (partner, my ass), who were alive and well if a continent away in Ottawa. Or like his last partner, Brigid Ertelle, also in Ottawa. Or like first-partner Frank Thu, who, like himself, was at least still numbered among the...the quick.
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Kevin Beldon was thinking about death, his own. In a million years he would never have believed that he’d return to California’s Point Conception Zen Centre to think about that. Like most of the uninitiated, he’d assumed that the trick in meditating wasto discipline the brain not to think, or to think nothing. That hope had been the big attraction of the monk’s life. Kevin had a lot not to think about, especially a number of deaths. Yet here he was, as per Jaken’s instructions, thinking about death, his own.
“Look at you!” Jaken had said two years earlier when Kevin returned from investigating the triple murder on Parliament Hill back home in Ottawa. “Why are you trying so hard to kill yourself, Kevin Beldon? Are you so in love with death, with your little cigars and big crime? ... Yes? Then tell me what death is!”
“I feel like I’m dying, Jaken.”
“Don’t feel, Beldon-san—think.” He tapped his temple.
He still missed his small Dutch cigars, his Panters, like a dear old dead friend. Like dear dead Cynthia, his wife, who had run away with him once upon a time from a boring high-school field trip, and he’d fallen in love forever. Or like Owen, hismurdered son. Kelly of course and Abiki Ali, her husband (partner, my ass), who were alive and well if a continent away in Ottawa. Or like his last partner, Brigid Ertelle, also in Ottawa. Or like first-partner Frank Thu, who, like himself, was at least still numbered among the...the quick.
Pre-order Price Guarantee at Amazon.ca; or from book sites everywhere; or directly from the publisher: [email protected]
Copyright: Gerald Lynch