A fourteen-year-old boy has been found hanged and mutilated in the basement of Satan House. It’s the second life the derelict mansion has claimed. The work of a brutal predator? A curse? Or a ritual cult murder? The boy’s death shocks parents in the Alberta city of Lethbridge, and police chief Eddy “Butch” Bochansky knows there will be reprisals. Trying to ward off panic, he persuades his old high school buddy, Billy Yamamoto, to act as a deputy detective and hunt down the killer. Recently returned to the plains, Billy’s just buried his own father and taken over a ranch in the foothills, a five hundred acre spread by Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. Convinced he can assist his old friend, Billy takes on his first murder case since retiring from the Vancouver force, where for thirty years he worked in the homicide unit and investigated organized crime. In Redfern’s breathless thriller, the unforgettable Yamamoto and his inherited team of local cops confront child abuse, professional negligence, and racial intolerance while finding connections between the boy and numerous “solid” Lethbridge citizens. Occult activities, drugs, and secret teenage pacts intersect with the world of loan sharks and smugglers as a small-town murder crosses the border and threatens to become an international incident. And then another body is found. Sifting through contradictory evidence, searching for a wholly unpredictable killer, pushed to the hilt, somehow, Yamamoto realizes, the heist of priceless Native artifacts from a U.S. burial site is the key. But can he unlock the mystery before he himself dies?

Jon Redfern was born and raised in Alberta. He has been a free-lance journalist for both the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail, a story editor for the CBC and a children’s playwright. Since 1989 his short stories have appeared in numerous literary journals including Grain, Event and Descant. When Jon Redfern was a graduate student at the University of Toronto he became fascinated by a relatively unexplored period of theatre history. His subsequent thesis on the operas and melodramas of London’s great theatres, and the producers of these entertainments, became the basis for his latest detective novel, Trumpets Sound No More. Jon’s first novel, The Boy Must Die, won the prestigious Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Crime Novel in Canada for 2002. Since that time, Jon has been researching and writing, teaching English as a professor at Centennial College in Toronto, serving for two years as the active Vice President, Toronto Chapter, of the Crime Writers of Canada, and traveling to Siena Italy, Havana Cuba, and Madrid Spain to attend conferences and continue research on up-coming writing projects. Jon lives in Toronto and in Waterton Lakes, Alberta.

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