Let’s welcome Luke to the Scribbler.
Luke
is another newcomer to our blog and he is most welcome.
He is just coming from a successful book launch at
The Write Cup in Saint John, NB.
He is also a participating author at the GMRD Book Fair in April.
We
are most fortunate to have him as a guest to tell us about his novel.
Plus
an Excerpt.
Read
on my friends.
Luke
Francis Beirne was born in Ireland in 1995 and now lives on the Wolastoqey land
of Saint John, New Brunswick. His first two novels, Foxhunt and Blacklion, were published by Baraka Books in 2022 and
2023 respectively. Saints Rest will be published by Baraka in March 2025. Beirne’s
writing has been stylistically compared to Graham Greene, Frederick Forsyth, Ernest Hemingway and John le Carre.
Title: Saints Rest
Synopsis:
Malory Fleet’s son was
killed by bikers and now she’s worried about his missing girlfriend, Amanda.
But that case was closed shut by the police a year ago and Frank Cain, the
private investigator she’s hired, is reluctant to take it on. On the sometimes seedy
streets of uptown Saint John, no one wants to talk, even fewer have anything to
say, and the police have cast a blanket of fog over everything. As Frank
searches fruitlessly for clues, he learns more about Malory than about Amanda,
and begins to grow wary. Throughout, Detective Stuart Boucher is following
Frank and making little effort to hide it, leading Cain to conclude that the
officer may have more to do with the case than he’s letting on. For Frank Cain,
as unmoored as a lost ship in the harbour, in unravelling this case he risks
unravelling himself.
Saints Rest is a
neo-noir novel set in a gritty and unforgiving Saint John, a town where few
people are prepared for its secrets, least of all Frank Cain.
The Story
Behind the Story:
In September 2022, I suffered a
life-threatening brain injury while boxing and spent five weeks in a coma. I
had to retrain my body to do everything, from moving my fingers to walking. While
I was in a coma, my second novel, Blacklion, was accepted for
publication by Baraka Books. With incredible difficulty and determination, I
trained myself to write again. Before I was able to structure my own days, my
partner would hand me a pen and notebook and ask me to write. My father, who is
also a writer, was amazed to see how well my writing had stayed intact, despite
the severity of my injury. I worked with a great Speech Language Pathologist,
at the Stan Cassidy Centre in Fredericton, who helped me with this. After my
release, I structured my days, setting aside specific times to sit down and
write. I also followed online writing courses diligently. Before my injury, I
had a rough draft of this book, which gave me something to focus on as I
relearned how to write. As a result, this is the book I am most proud of so
far.
A question before you go, Luke:
Scribbler: Where is your favourite spot to write? Are you messy or neat? Your beverage of choice?
Luke: At home or the Saint John Free Public Library.
I am neat.
A deep, dark roast coffee, black.
An Excerpt from Saints Rest.
In Saint John, sunshine
was rare. When day broke, the sky turned grey and shards of light glared through to
front steps where people huddled and smoked, to dockyards where people worked,
to park benches where people slept. In the city’s peripheries––the east and
west––people sat in breakfast nooks and morning rooms, and maybe the sun shone
there, rising over pine-crested cliffs and frozen bays as bacon sizzled in the
pan and accounts were discussed, as affairs ended in lawsuits and bitter
resentment rather than fistfights and broken windows; but, in the heart, Saint
John woke when the light shifted and darkness retreated behind the clouds,
distant but ever-present, looming over the uneven rise of flat-top roofs.
In our office, Randy and I
were wide awake. I hunched over a space heater beside the corner window with
a double double and a folder of surveillance photos suggesting that Dustin
Colter could walk on his left foot and was, therefore, ineligible for worker’s
comp. Randy sat at his desk writing up the delicate details of an infidelity
case.
Our office was on the third floor
of a townhouse on Princess Street. The ceilings were tall and the windows
narrow. From the corner, you could see over the curve of the road to the
plateau of the harbour, where the fog gathered and rolled.
Below was the South End. Cannery
Row, by another name. In the South End, people were real; ghostly demarcations
kept apparitions at bay. I sipped the coffee and looked out. It wasn’t good but
it was familiar.
Footsteps in the hallway stopped in
front of the door, drawing a slouching silhouette behind the glass. When the
door opened, a woman stood in front of us. Looking forty or way past it, she had distinct
smile lines at the upper edge of her mouth, though it didn’t appear that they’d
had much exercise lately.
The woman was worn, beaten. She
wore an old, fur lined puffer coat: once expensive, now stained and torn.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” Randy
asked. He set down his pen, looking her up and down as he did.
The woman glanced at me, then back
to Randy. “Is this the Cormier Agency?” She spoke with the rasp
of a lifelong smoker.
Randy couldn’t help but smile. “It
is,” he said. He closed the file on his desk. “I’m Randy Cormier. Come on in.”
Randy was a good guy. I felt a kind
of obligation to him because I was his first employee and he hired me before we even met. The
woman looked at me again and closed the door. She was nervous.
Randy gestured to the chair in
front of his desk. “Take a seat.” She began to unzip her jacket but he lifted his
hand. “You might want to leave your coat on,” he said. “Landlord controls the
heat.”
She sat down and folded her arms in
her lap, pulling the palms of her hands into her sleeves. Yellow fingertips
protruded from the ends.
“What can we do for you?” Randy
asked.
I set my coffee on the spare desk
in the corner and sat behind it. I opened the folder and began to sort through
the photos inside. When Randy’s at work, I like to fade into the background. That’s where I feel most
comfortable, the background.
“My daughter in law is missing,”
the woman said.
“Ok. When was she last seen?” Randy
asked.
“Over a year ago.”
Randy nodded. He opened the top
drawer of his desk and took out a thin black binder. He flipped to an empty
sheet. “I’m going to start taking some notes,” he said, “in case we open a
file. I won’t charge you unless we take you on.”
She nodded.
“What’s your name?” Randy began,
filling in the blanks at the top of the sheet.
“Malory Fleet.”
I looked up. I did not know Malory but I knew
her name. More importantly, I knew the case she was bringing us.
In 2015, on the night of Halloween, her son Jason Fleet was shot to
death outside his apartment. No charges were ever laid. Jason was not much missed by the
Saint John Police Department. One year to the day, his girlfriend, Amanda
Foster, was reported missing.
For a while, the coincidence
brought attention to the case. Then it faded into obscurity, relegated to
unsolved mystery forums and half-hearted Facebook posts appealing for
information.
Randy glanced over at me and then
returned his gaze to the woman. “And your daughter in law is?”
“Amanda Foster.”
Randy set down his pen. “So,
they’ve had no luck then?”
“The police don’t give a shit.
They’re crooked,” Malory said. “That’s why I’m here.”
“Are you in contact with her
family?”
“You’re looking at her family.”
Randy nodded. “Ok,” he said.
“Malory, listen. A missing family member is usually an easy enough case, a
simple matter of asking around. An investigation like this though, with the
complicating factors––your son, the ongoing investigation, the police––it could
get complicated. It might take a lot of time.” He paused. “It might be
expensive.”
“You don’t think I can afford it.”
“That’s no reflection of yourself,”
Randy said, exhaling loudly. “I don’t think I could afford
it.”
Malory shrugged.
“Cut me loose when my cheques bounce.”
For a while, Randy just looked at
her, contemplating. Then he nodded. “Ok,” he said. “Let’s open a file. Talk to me.”
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