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DEVIL IN ME, THE
by J.D. Carpenter
McClelland & Stewart, September 2002
320 pages
$6.95
ISBN: 0771019238


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Detective Campbell Young of Toronto Homicide is three years from retirement and not anxious to take unnecessary risks. He's also a bit of a dinosaur, and contemporary culture puzzles him not a little. He cannot understand why he should be termed a racist for using a racial epithet when his best friend and former partner is black. He cannot quite accept his daughter's mixed-race baby, or at least his name, Jamal. He has difficulty imagining what gays do or why and thinks they should be made to stop. All in all, a difficult character to like, it would seem, and one whom the force will not miss when he does retire. Yet as we follow his pursuit of a particularly nasty serial killer, we come to see that his reflexive attitudes conceal a much more complex and better man, one who has muffled his native intelligence and sensitivity in order to cope with the demands of his job.

It is 1992 in Toronto and two series are underwayãthe World Series, which for the first time is being played outside the United States, and a series of brutal rape-murders of editors of small literary magazines. The killer, we find quite early in, is an aspiring poet, a compulsive list-maker, and a former literature teacher who leaves teasing clues drawn from Shakespeare. He would seem to be precisely the sort of killer that would most defeat the bluff Campbell Young, but the detective is a man of resource and he calls upon an English teacher friend to help him understand what the murderer is telling him. As he chases down the killer, Young learns something about himself, his failings, and his biases. At one point he is able to think, "Everyone is capable of evil, but in our society no one is more capable of it than white men." Campbell Young might almost stand as a metaphor for what has become of Toronto-the-Good in the last twenty years. Massive immigration has transformed the city from a self-righteous, lily-white bastion of Protestant rectitude to the most multicultural city in North America and perhaps the world. Toronto-the-Good has become Toronto-the-Infinitely-Better and Young likewise becomes a better man.

J.D. Carpenter is a published poet, and The Devil in Me is his first novel. He has a sharp sense of characterization and a sensitivity to language, but he does not make the mistake of writing "poetically," just well. A series is planned, but Carpenter may regret that three years to retirement deadline since we will certainly want to see more than that of Campbell Young.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, July 2002

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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