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weaselweader's review against another edition
3.0
“Boris brought in chicks from Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, all over eastern Europe … “
The oft-heard moniker, “Toronto the Good”, was coined by mayor William Holmes Howland from the title of an 1898 book to showcase Toronto’s reputation as a shining representative of 19th century Victorian morality. By the middle of the 20th century, the most one could hope for when you heard the phrase was a wry smile at its outrageous irony. On Yonge Street, you couldn’t walk twenty paces without encountering a strip club, a hooker on the make, a tittie bar, a porn shop, a peep show or a rub and tug parlour.
DIRTY SWEET is an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek, sleazy, frequently humorous but always dark tale of that Toronto and the interplay between biker gangs, the sex trade, the rise of internet pornography, murder, money laundering, and the clash for supremacy between international organized crime families. It’s a gritty, complex, and fast-paced debut novel that clearly places Canadian author John McFetridge into the ranks of contemporary crime and thriller writers to watch for.
Paul Weiss
The oft-heard moniker, “Toronto the Good”, was coined by mayor William Holmes Howland from the title of an 1898 book to showcase Toronto’s reputation as a shining representative of 19th century Victorian morality. By the middle of the 20th century, the most one could hope for when you heard the phrase was a wry smile at its outrageous irony. On Yonge Street, you couldn’t walk twenty paces without encountering a strip club, a hooker on the make, a tittie bar, a porn shop, a peep show or a rub and tug parlour.
DIRTY SWEET is an irreverent, tongue-in-cheek, sleazy, frequently humorous but always dark tale of that Toronto and the interplay between biker gangs, the sex trade, the rise of internet pornography, murder, money laundering, and the clash for supremacy between international organized crime families. It’s a gritty, complex, and fast-paced debut novel that clearly places Canadian author John McFetridge into the ranks of contemporary crime and thriller writers to watch for.
Paul Weiss
rosseroo's review
4.0
American crime fiction grandmaster Elmore Leonard has lived for the past 80 years in Detroit, which is only about 150 miles from Toronto. So I shouldn't have been surprised that this Canadian crime book felt so familiar to me. It's pretty much a Leonardesque crime caper, relocated north of the border, complete with rat-a-tat snappy dialogue, and more angle-playing chancers than you can shake a Molson at. The story is pure Leonard: a struggling-but-striving commercial real estate agent named Roxanne recognizes the getaway driver in a daylight murder. But rather than talking to the cops, she decides to try and leverage this into something that will rescue her from the murky Scottish-Canadian mobster she's in business with. Next thing you know, she's knee deep in strip-club-owning Russian mobsters, a rugged internet porn producer, and even biker gangs -- not to mention the cops pursuing the murder case. As in Leonard's books, the seedier side of life is not played for prurience -- it just is what it is, and all the dreamers and criminals have their own interests and agendas to pursue. The plot is jammed with the kind of crazy scheming and deadpan humor that will be familiar to Leonard's fans, so if you like him, give this a try. It's not quite up to his high standard, but it's from the same menu.
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