In the early 1990s Montreal witnessed a brutal tit-for-tat cycle of bombings as two biker gangs, the Hells Angels and the Rock Machine, battled for dominance in that city. Now John Farrow (the pseudonym for writer Trevor Ferguson) has mined those events for artistic gain in City of Ice, a literary thriller that unravels a Montreal cop’s investigation into the biker bombings, the Russian mafia, and the murder of Santa Claus.

City of Ice is a page-turner stuffed with reportage worthy of the likes of a Tom Wolfe or a Charles Dickens. The central story revolves around the murder of a police informant who was tortured and discovered on Christmas Eve stuffed into a Santa suit. The detective on the case is Émile Cinq-Mars, a star officer whose career has prospered by following tips from a mysterious “source.” The investigation drives Cinq-Mars deep into a web of criminal conspiracies and provides fodder for Farrow to explore aspects of contemporary Quebec.

In an early paragraph that outlines the history of Montreal, for example, Farrow writes: “Following the conquest, which concluded in Montreal in 1760…Frenchmen of ambition became either priests or thieves. The former received authority and respect while the latter were praised as folk heroes…[Today] churches of old still present their spires to the sky, just as criminals, even the most savage among them, continue to be revered.” This summary may strike some readers as simplistic, but Farrow deserves praise for his dispassionate depiction of the cultural and linguistic conflicts that make life in Quebec so often interesting and complicated.

Farrow’s excellent novel is dedicated to Daniel Desrochers, the 11-year-old boy killed in Montreal by a biker’s bomb in 1995, an act that precipitated an aggressive police campaign fuelled by new crime fighting powers granted by Ottawa. City of Ice suggests that the perpetrators of that crime were influenced as much by the massive shift in global politics in the past decade as by the drive to dominate Montreal’s organized crime scene. Farrow’s novel has enough grit to satisfy fans of the genre and enough intelligence to be a welcome addition to the ongoing exploration of Canada’s two solitudes in the context of a changing world.