Emile Cinq-Mars

Tortured, then murdered, a university student dressed up as Santa Claus is left hanging from a meat hook on Christmas Eve - a gift intended for one particular cop. Detective Emile Cinq-Mars, local hero and old-style cop, wants the truth - and his gripping search takes him through a bone-chilling Montreal winter and into the heart of the city's colourful criminal underworld, where rival biker gangs, the Russian Mafia, and meddlers from the CIA all vie for a piece of the frozen city.

Montreal, 1975. Detective Émile Cinq-Mars is transferring from the Night Patrol - the notoriously tough department of officers in charge of watching over the city as it sleeps - to the day shift. His old superior has seen to it that he's assigned to partner Yves Giroux, another ex-Night Patrol detective some say isn't on the "up and up". Getting in a house is easy for thief Quinn Tanner. The stress comes in getting out clean. On finding her getaway driver dead after her latest heist, she goes underground.

Montreal, 1978. Newly promoted Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars attends the scene of 17 break-ins at an apartment complex. Nothing more than stolen toasters. Cinq-Mars suspects that the burglaries are a trial run for a bigger heist...until he discovers a body pinned to a wall with a machete in one apartment. When the former captain of Night Patrol, Armand Touton, receives a tip from an undercover informant in the Mafia, Cinq-Mars is ordered to intervene with a prisoner's release: the man must stay behind bars. He fails with the task and the immediate consequences are devastating.