The murder of a marginal, emotionally unstable, onetime member of the revolutionary separatist group the Front de Liberation du Québec (FLQ) in a Paris apartment in 1971 was the linchpin of a Canadian security operation to intimidate the remaining FLQ members into silence.

This is the assertion of Michael McLoughlin, who spent five years trawling through dusty archives piecing together a paper trail from the discards and scattered threads left after records of the action were destroyed. Before the publication of Last Stop, Paris, there were rumours of lawsuits and hints of deeper political intrigue that seem of a piece with the book’s faintly pedantic, methodical paranoia.

McLoughlin follows Bachand from his middle-class origins in the cauldron of Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, through the formation of the FLQ and the bombings of 1963, to imprisonment, exile in Cuba and France during the frenzy and aftermath of the October Crisis, and to his execution in which he seems a victim of factionalist infighting. McLoughlin does a good job sketching the faddish prevalence of revolutionary rhetoric through the 1960s and early ’70s – so well that Bachand’s assassination seems almost unnecessary. In hindsight, the winds of fashion would have made the FLQ irrelevant.

In this light, one has to conclude that, even if his assertions are correct, McLoughlin’s cloak-and-dagger tale is still little more than a historical footnote. His research appears thorough, however tangential. Still, his version of Bachand’s death is based on mostly incomplete paper documentation, since few of the many players interviewed – the RCMP, the FLQ, the media, French security services, and others – went on record with actual quotes.

McLoughlin relies on the tactic of reconstructing scenes – terrorists skulking around Westmount planting bombs, bureaucrats meeting in Ottawa conference rooms – with an ominous “you are there” narrative. The reader may – if sufficiently paranoid – dare call this a conspiracy.