LET LOOSE THE DOGS

The last time Acting Detective William Murdoch, of Toronto’s Number Four Station, saw his father was in 1873, and to Murdoch, remembering the alcoholism and violent outbursts that led him to run away from home with his sister Susanna, the ensuing 22 years have not been long enough. Nothing could induce him to visit Henry Murdoch again—unless the visit took him to the Don Jail, where his father’s waiting to be hanged in four days for the murder of John Delaney, the owner of a rival ratter Harry insisted was cheating him and his own dog, Havoc, in a bloody competition to kill the most rats. Despite his public, intemperate quarrel with Delaney, Harry swears he can’t remember killing him, though his memory for acts of violence, as his son reminds him, has been none too reliable in the past. Still numbed by the recent death of Susanna, whom he couldn’t even see on her deathbed because of the cloistered vows she’d taken, Murdoch begins making the rounds of the witnesses with an equivocal goal: to establish either his father’s innocence or his guilt beyond any doubt. His task made more difficult by the universal agreement that the police arrested the right man, Murdoch succeeds in bringing the real killer to book and also finally manages, in an especially affecting interlude, to lose his virginity.

Not only the most generously plotted of Murdoch’s four cases (Poor Tom is Cold, 2001, etc.), but the one whose constant reminders of mortality, via wounded dogs, chicks, and rats, are the most piercing.