The Road to Heaven by Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson’s Road to Heaven is a gritty private-eye novel written in the first person, with crisp dialogue, sharp narrative, and poetic setting descriptions.
The protagonist, Patrick Bird, is a young private investigator new to the job, with just a few infidelity cases behind him. He’s got a surly attitude that prevented him from joining the police force. All the same, his boss, Sid, gives him a chance to work at the agency. It turns out Patrick has more moxie and smarts than either his boss or his client bargained for, with Bird digging deep to uncover the truth – even when both the client and his boss say, “Case closed.”
The book is reminiscent of a fast-paced Dashiell Hammett novel. Although Hammett’s works are generally set in the 1920s and 1930s, the era when he was actively writing, what makes Stefanovich-Thomson’s book unique is its Toronto setting in the mid-sixties.
The author has done a remarkable amount of research into that era to create a believable backdrop with authentic characters, as if the book had been written in 1965 rather than in 2024.
Described by others as “Maple noir,” the book is very much Canada’s own version of the hard-boiled detective novel, with characters verging on self-destruction in the classic noir style made famous south of the border.
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