SOJALS rating:

Mediocre (2/5)

I first read this in May 1998.

In the Toronto of the near future, the police, as always, are fighting a losing battle against crime. Organized crime has more money, more resources and better weaponry, it's tentacles reach into high levels of the administration and crime prevention.

For the officers themselves, faced with knowledge that they can but rarely make a difference, it's soul destroying. Police officers have a divorce rate twice the national average and life expectancy forty-percent below.

Mitch Helwig is such an officer. His wife has left him, he's losing his daughter. He's not been thinking clearly since he found his wife cheating on him. So he's probably still not at his best when he decides to take out a warehouse full of several billion dollars of illegal drugs and other criminal paraphanalia.

Of course, the criminals are less than happy about this significant loss to their enterprise, and turn their sights on Helwig, his fellow officers and his family.

And meantime, scientists at the Sunnybrook Medical Centre has discovered how to resurrect, for just a few weeks, the dead.

Not bad, not bad at all. Barely SF, but still quite a powerful and perceptive novel, occasionally with big guns wielded and gratuitous violence meted out