Congratulations to Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson 😀 His debut novel about artless young detective Patrick Bird in Toronto’s tumultuous 1960s – The Road to Heaven – has been shortlisted for the 2025 Mystery Writers of America Edgar Awards, in the Best Paperback Original Category 🏆
About the Book
Patrick Bird, police academy burnout turned PI, works divorce cases, using his camera to catch the unfaithful and the lonely looking for love in rented rooms. But his easy routine is shattered by a new case involving a missing girl.
Sixteen-year-old Abbie Linklater hasn’t been home for two days. Her stepmother believes Abbie’s getting an abortion. Her twin brother thinks she’s studying at the library. Her best friend couldn’t care less. Her father has no idea; he just wants her home without involving the police.
Before the sun sets on the first day of his investigation, as Bird roams the streets of Toronto looking for the runaway, he’s caught a drifter prowling in the Linklaters’ backyard, stumbled into a creepy church with a belligerent minister, sparred with the client, been hit by a car, and discovered some loose ends in a bank robbery gone wrong a decade earlier.
And that’s before he finds the body.
Praise
“This twisty noir thriller will appeal to fans of Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy.” — Booklist
“In this taut and stylish debut, Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson plunges the reader headlong into a Toronto period piece affectionately stage lit by noir. The opening scene’s flashbulb pop exposes the loneliness and corrosive underbelly of a thickly peopled mystery. PI Patrick Bird’s dogged pursuit of a missing persons case is captured with a wry awareness of a gaping postwar generational divide and a pitiless eye for intimate affairs.” — Andrew Steinmetz, author of Because