In Punishment, his first novel since completing his Long Stretch trilogy, Scotiabank Giller-winner Linden MacIntyre brings us a powerful exploration of justice and vengeance, and the peril that ensues when passion replaces reason, in a small town shaken by a tragic death.
   Forced to retire early from his job as a corrections officer in Kingston Penitentiary, Tony Breau has limped back to the village where he grew up to lick his wounds, only to find that Dwayne Strickland, a young con he’d had dealings with in prison is back there too–and once again in trouble. Strickland has just been arrested following the suspicious death of a teenage girl, the granddaughter of Caddy Stewart, Tony’s first love.
   Tony is soon caught in a fierce emotional struggle between the outcast Strickland and the still alluring Caddy. And then another figure from Tony’s past, the forceful Neil Archie MacDonald–just retired in murky circumstances from the Boston police force–stokes the community’s anger and suspicion and an irresistible demand for punishment. As Tony struggles to resist the vortex of vigilante action, Punishment builds into a total page-turner that blindsides you with twists and betrayals.

LINDEN MACINTYRE was the host of Canada’s premiere investigative television show, the fifth estate, for nearly twenty-five years. Born in St. Lawrence, Newfoundland, and raised in Port Hastings, Cape Breton, he began his career in 1964 with the Halifax Chronicle-Herald as a parliamentary bureau reporter. MacIntyre later worked at The Journal and hosted CBC Radio’s Sunday Morning before joining the fifth estate. His work on that show garnered an International Emmy, and he has won ten Gemini Awards.

His bestselling first novel, The Long Stretch, was nominated for a CBA Libris Award, while his boyhood memoir, Causeway: A Passage from Innocence, was a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2006 and won both the Edna Staebler Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award. His second novel, The Bishop’s Man, was a #1 national bestseller and the winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction and the CBA Libris Fiction Book of the Year Award. His other novels include Why Men Lie, Punishment and The Only Café. MacIntyre lives in Toronto with his wife, CBC radio host and author Carol Off. They spend their summers in a Cape Breton village by the sea.

Linden MacIntyre's profile page

• Nominated, OLA Evergreen Award