K.G.E. “Chuck” Konkel was heralded as the second coming of John le Carré for his 1987 novel The Glorious East Wind. Evil Never Sleeps, then, is best described as le Carré on speed. The pace and complexity of this new yarn reach excessive levels at times. That’s not necessarily a bad thing in an ambitious thriller, but it does obscure the big picture, if indeed there is a big picture in this story.

Konkel, a staff sergeant with the Toronto police, sets his new novel in a netherworld where a corrupt national police force clashes with the civilian government it purports to serve. If you guessed Mexico and its Federales, you’re right. Konkel’s good-cop protagonist Miguel Fuentes, once a high-ranking Federale investigator in Mexico City, has been demoted for poking his nose into misdeeds in high places, and is now police chief in the small town of Coronado. While investigating a bombing at a rundown motel near the town, Fuentes uncovers a vipers’ nest of treachery on an international scale, involving cross-border drug-dealing from a U.S. air force base in Arizona. American government agents, air force security officers, Mexican Secret Service spooks, and Fuentes’ former partner – now his corrupt boss – all figure in the action.

Just how that action encompasses a revolutionary new computer that can control an aircraft in flight, a death threat on the president of Mexico, a papal visit, and a peasant uprising over offshore oil makes a tale of many tortuous twists and turns. Too many, in fact. The novel keeps the reader second-guessing the motives of all players, which overwhelms the characterization, and the car chases, gunfights, and nocturnal killing become a blur of action for its own sake. Still, Konkel holds you to the bitter end searching for answers. Whether you get them depends upon whether you manage to penetrate the maze of plotting he creates.