BWW Reviews: WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHING IN Introduces Anthony Bidulka's New Detective

We all love James Bond, but, let's face it, in Ian Fleming's books, he's now a little dated. He's got commitment issues - and when he did commit, his wife got murdered. He's got no family or real family story - everyone's dead before the series starts, and quite far back in his life at that. The staff at his job include a chiding but not difficult boss, a boss's secretary with a crush on him, and a guy who makes him nifty gadgets. He's Scottish. He's... well, it's all a bit dreary and old-fashioned, isn't it?

Why not have some excitement? Why not have an agent who's managed to commit, and even have a child? Surely constant travel and constant danger have to put that into difficult territory. Hey, it's a modern age - what if his wife (or ex-wife) is also an agent? Why not have a family, too - a real family, with problem relatives? The sort that you normally hate to have to visit, but that you can't avoid. And what about bosses with issues, like real government agency bosses? And what if this agent was really cool - oh, say, cool enough to be Canadian? Why should Scots be the only ones who take late-night flights to dangerous international hot-spots while hiding from deranged (now post-Cold-War) Russian operatives? Canadians can do the same thing, and know more about blizzard preparation while they're at it, which is handy if Siberia is involved.

But gadgets - both computer technology to weep for and cars of doom - are still there, because our hero needs information. And, of course, to get from zero to sixty in 3.2 seconds. Yet it's a modern era, so not only are there modern computers here, but a teen computer whiz of a nephew at their helm, because if you really want computer expertise these days, you need a kid, not a middle-aged agency employee.

And there you have Anthony Bidulka's Adam Saint, leading man of WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHING IN, published by Canada's Insomniac Press. An operative for the CDRA, the Canadian Disaster Recovery Agency, when anything Canadian gets destroyed somewhere else, it's his job to check the damage and to figure out how to keep governments out of trouble. Now, though, not only has a plane crashed in Russian territory, but his own boss, who shouldn't even have gone there to check the problem, has died there as well, and something smells wrong to the veteran damage control expert. Things are so wrong, in fact, that doctors are handing him pills he doesn't want, he's cashiering his job, and his existence seems to be disappearing from government records. At a time like that you go home - but Adam Saint hasn't been back to the farm in Saskatechwan since he went to school, and he's not much more popular with his family than with his former employers.

A mother and child are on the run, staying in cheap hotels across the Canadian prairie - and why does her son have laser scopes trained on him? Why are half-clothed, kidnapped women showing up near his family's farm, only to turn on Saint when he sees them in a bar? Why is his ex-wife showing up on his father's doorstep - and why didn't he bother to tell his family he'd gotten divorced? Why did his doctor, the one with the pills, just kill himself? What are poisonous snakes doing in his hotel bedroom? And what's the cold-blooded, cigar-smoking, Scotch-guzzling, designer-scarf-adorned head of his organization going to do to fix anything, especially now that he's walked out on his department of her agency? When all he really wanted was to figure out just why his supervisor died, it all seems a bit much.

It's a "bit much" that takes Saint from Ontario to Russia, to Singapore, and then back to the family home in Saskatchewan, a province that can be as mysterious as and hold all the danger of snake-infested Asian outposts when you've crossed the wrong people. It's a "bit much" that introduces us to his nephew Anatole, computer genius who's traveled the world without leaving the farm; to Maryann Knoble, the tough-as-nails director of the IIA (International Intelligence Agency), who directs his work for the CDRA and who plays chess games with the living; and to his sister Alexandra, Saskatoon's queen of kickass. All three must reappear in future novels to avoid major reader anger - these are such finely detailed, perfectly crafted characters that we already feel vaguely attached to them, whether we like them or not.

If anything really disappoints in this novel, other than that it ended, it's that the MacGuffin - and oh, is there a big, beautiful MacGuffin here, one that becomes increasingly personal to Saint once it's revealed to him and to the reader - winds up feeling rather more like a red herring by the end of the story. But Saint finds his family again, and maybe that's just a bit more important than the MacGuffin itself. And at least the MacGuffin here makes it all the way to the end - in so many cases, especially in filmed thrillers and suspense stories, they disappear entirely at some point.

But the positives here far, far outweigh the drawbacks, and that's key. And one of those positives is the most crucial one for the first novel in a planned series - Bidulka succeeds in making the reader care about the main characters and what happens to them; we want to see what happens to Saint next, and we're curious about his family and his agency head. There's certainly a great deal more to be known about Maryann Knoble. Another one of those positives is Bidulka's living up to his reputation as a detail-oriented author; his descriptions, whether of people, of places, or of things, are perfectly illustrated. The Raffles Hotel in Singapore is a frequently-used location for story advancement, but rarely has it felt so clearly depicted. But the same is true for lesser-known places, and those invented just for this novel, such as Saint's family farm and his own office. And, as always, Saskatchewan is lovingly depicted as the center of the known universe (which, who knows, it just might be). Bidulka could be the greatest literary booster the province has ever had.

WHEN THE SAINTS GO MARCHING IN is more of a thriller/suspense genre work than a classic mystery, although mystery is definitely in the picture. There's still enough of a mystery for this to be appealing to those who don't normally gravitate to the thriller genre. Although the genre is a departure for Bidulka, whose Russell Quant series features a classic private investigator hero handling more traditional mysteries, it's one he clearly has a knack for delivering. Clear off the bookshelf and make a little extra space beside your Quant collection, so there's room for a new guest. Adam Saint may be at least a few mystery readers' new best friend.

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