Full review:

“In the neo-noir novel, TheMan Who Killed, Fraser Nixon introduces us to Mick, a down-on-his-luck former medical student and morphine addict who subsists in the miasmic undersideof a 1920s Montreal characterized by drugs, drink, violence,and organized crime.What glamour available is associated with dark nights spent in rumpled suits and gutters; it quickly turns to something darker, even monstrous. A job has gone wrong, and Mick is forced to go underground and wait for his mysterious friend Jack in various flea-infested dives. Further complicating his life is the torch he’s carrying for a woman who wants nothing to do with him. Laura is the object of his conflicted affection, but her loyalty is not to him. As time goes on, and events conspire against him, Mick becomes unsure about Jack’s loyalty. And Mick is forced to confront his own ragged sense of loyalty. Nixon evokes a jazz-era Montreal to effect, but injects the scenes with the sinister. Caught in the murky territory of gangsters and prostitutes, this Jekyll-Hyde tale for the rum-running set is murky with guns, government corruption, drug money and self-justifications for thievery and murder. Presenting a Canada both European and American, with influences and traditions that compete for legitimacy, Nixon manages to provide a portrait of an emerging nation in this dark yarn, politicizing his gangster tale with a conception of a budding nation on the cusp of its own identity crisis,’the fair-haired child of the Empire’ who flirts with the evil underbelly of civilization.”

Heather Craig for the Telegraph-Journal