Those Magic Words: “Vigilante Season has been sent to the printer.”

My publisher, Linda Leith, called last week to tell me that Vigilante Season, the second book in the Luc Vanier series, was finally on its way to the printer, marking the end of a long summer of hair-pulling revisions and re-writes. Writing Vigilante Season was great fun, but revising and editing it was less so. It’s a humbling experience to work with good editors and fact-checkers. Nobody’s perfect, and we all benefit from having someone pointing out the imperfections. Everyone did a great job, but I think the fact checker had the most fun, stopping people driving the wrong way up one-way streets and making sure the dead stayed dead, and didn’t reappear like zombies ten pages later.

So I am happy to see Vigilante Season go to print. It’s hard to let go, but it’s satisfying to get it finished at last.

In the novel, Inspector Luc Vanier is in Hochelaga investigating the brutal murder of a local drug dealer. Hochelaga is a blue collar neighbourhood in Montreal’s east end that has been all but abandoned by the political class, and a paramilitary group, the Société des Patriotes de Montréal, has stepped into the vacuum and begun flexing its muscle. The local police commander is proud of the declining crime statistics, but Vanier suspects the neighbourhood cleanup may involve murdering the unwanted. When Vanier is suspended for beating a young suspect, he’s on his own, fighting to prove his innocence and discover who really controls the streets, while struggling to help his son, Alex, back from Afghanistan and crippled by PTSD.

Vigilante Season will be published in October 2013, and Quill and Quire has listed Vigilante Season in their fall preview of the “most anticipated Canadian Fiction.”.