Hatred, blackmail, and murder—a Brad Shade hat trick. The Black Ace reunites us with our favourite, savvy fourth-liner, with plot twists, wisecracks, and an ending that could only come from G.B. Joyce.

Thanks to Shade’s work at the NHL draft last season, he gets to hold on to his job as scout for L.A.—at least for now. But a journeyman’s work is never done. Shade is checking out the talent in Regina with his old friend and teammate “Chief.” But when they learn of the suicide of an old teammate from their playing days in L.A., they take a sometimes violent detour through the dark side of a small town with no shortage of secrets it wants kept at almost any cost.

Gare Joyce has written about sports for over thirty years, winning four National Magazine Awards and landing on The Best American Sports Writing notable list seven times. Joyce is the author of eleven books, including Sidney Crosby: Taking the Game by Storm and The Devil And Bobby Hull. He is a senior writer with Sportsnet and was previously a hockey columnist for The Globe and Mail and a staff feature writer for ESPN The Magazine and espn.com. Joyce lives in Toronto, seven subway stops from the Air Canada Centre.

Gare Joyce's profile page

Praise for The Code:

“One of this continent’s master craftsmen of sporting prose”…as fine a writer as can be found in any field.”
--Sports Illustrated

“This thriller has enough juice to satisfy those who’ve never been to a rink.”
--Library Journal
“[Joyce’s] knowledgeable, engagingly cynical perspective on hockey should prove compelling even for those readers with no interest in the sport.”
--Publishers Weekly
"Part CSI, part L.A. Law, part Hockey Night in Canada—Gare Joyce deserves a championship ring for his uncanny portrayal of Brad Shade, the earthy, educated hockey scout sleuth. This is sports writing, crime writing, and just plain writing as good as it gets." —Roy MacGregor
"The Code is surely one of the great 'insider' fictions of the professional hockey world. Funny and full of dirty fights both on and off the ice, it delivers an astringent look into big league machinations and the human costs of playing the game."
—Andrew Pyper, author of The Guardians
“For an amateur-detective story to work, the main character, the non-cop investigator, has to be well-drawn and engaging. Shade is both, and it's his clever rapscallion personality that propels the story.” —Winnipeg Free Press