Hunting his great enemy Elmo Apse, the thief of Columbine's glimmering spirit, Jack, who was once Harlequin, is an invisible prowler of the lairs of the Sutton complex, that marvel of human enterprise and architecture. Under the direction of the evangelist Ralph Jim Trasker, Jack tinkers with lives, comforts the distressed, adjusts inequities, censors, and is actually God, though on a part-time and amateur basis.

The odious tyrant General Schata has meanwhile arrived on a state visit and soon his limousine will pass the Sutton. Can he be reached by an assassin's bullet?

Between the finding of his enemy's lair and their mortal battle in the dark caverns of the Sutton underlie, Jack intersects with a baroque gallery of rogues and saints, preachers and politicians and hockey players.

Mrs Delgardo, the last great courtesan, presides in the Nailer Clinic over her final group of lovers and admirers, among whom is the enigmatic Gavrilov, sometimes known as Mr Smith, who if he could speak clearly might have much to say. Outside the Nailer stranger life abounds: Cleveland Dan, who is living in Paradise, the right-wing ascetic Douglas T. Harder who inadvertently incites the regrettable outbreak of arson, death, destruction and widespread rapine that enlivens the closing pages of this fabulous novel, Mandrake the mortician, the Wake-Up Man, an Old Testament prophet on the loose, Dr Baumgartner who runs an alternative system of health care from a night spot, and by all means the beautiful Imogene Wedekind, with whom the story opens. She is failing sexually until she develops a taste for hockey players, and in particular for the Golden Great One, Jean-Guy Pickett.

This is Leo Simpson's sixth book and his first novel in many years. It is a bursting Shandian story on a major scale, witty and funny, elegant and outrageously inventive, beautiful and true.

Leo Simpson is the author of four novels and a collection of short stories. He was publicity manager and an editor at Macmillan of Canada (1961-66). His book reviews appeared frequently in the Globe & Mail from 1966 to 1988. He has contributed interviews, stories, articles and plays to CBC Stage, CBC Playhouse and To See Ourselves. His articles have been published by The Montrealer, Saturday Night, Canadian Forum, Books In Canada, Canadian Commentator and Quill & Quire. His radio plays have been broadcast on Nation Public Radio (University of Wisconsin), West German Radio and by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Leo Simpson was writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa, 1973-74 and at the University of Western Ontario, 1978-79. He was also a weekly book column contributor to The Hamilton Spectator, 1980-84. Born in Limerick, Ireland, he now lives and writes at The Moodie Cottage in Belleville -- the same cottage where Susanna Moodie wrote Roughing It in the Bush in 1852.

He has contributed interviews, stories, articles and plays to CBC Stage, CBC Playhouse and To See Ourselves. His articles have been published by The Montrealer, Saturday Night, Canadian Forum, Books In Canada, Canadian Commentator and Quill & Quire. His radio plays have been broadcast on Nation Public Radio (University of Wisconsin), West German Radio and by the British Broadcasting Corporation. Leo Simpson was writer-in-residence at the University of Ottawa, 1973-74 and at the University of Western Ontario, 1978-79. He was also a weekly book column contributor to The Hamilton Spectator, 1980-84.

Leo Simpson's profile page