"God help us, Dent - the thing is, my daughter has become a dope fiend."

Maxwell Dent studied law at McGill and served in the RCAF and Intelligence M-5 during the Korean War. For a private investigator, he's as respectable as they come. No wonder then that it's Dent Huntley Ashton summons to his Westmount mansion. A respected captain of industry, the wealthy man knows the PI can be relied upon to be discreet.

Ashton's daughter Helen has fallen into heroin addiction, and the millionaire wants Dent to smash the ring supplying her vice, just as he took down a ring operating in Korea.

Set in 1954, the novel captures the dying days of Montreal's reputation as one of the world's great sin cities. The Damned and the Destroyed was published in 1962 by McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Dennis Dobson in the UK; this Ricochet Books edition marks the first print edition in more than five decades.

Kenneth Orvis is the pen name of Montreal-born thriller writer Kenneth Lemieux. His other books include Hickory House (1956), Night Without Darkness (1965), Cry Hallelujah! (1970), Into a Dark Mirror (1971), The Disinherited (1974), The Doomsday List (1974), and the memoir Over and Under the Table: The Anatomy of an Alcoholic (1985).

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Brian Busby is Ricochet Books’ series editor. He is the author of A Gentleman of Pleasure: One Life of John Glassco, Poet, Translator, Memoirist and Pornographer (McGill-Queens UP, 2011) and editor of The Heart Accepts it all: Selected Letters of John Glassco (Véhicule, 2013).

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