Body Contact

Michael Payne is the City of Edmonton archivist and the co-author of A
Narrative History of Fort Dunvegan.

Carl North is working as a police officer in a small Southern Ontario
city when a friend informs him that his wife has not come home for two
nights. The wife had a serious gambling problem and a history of
extramarital entanglements. What sets the novel’s plot in motion is
the uncomfortable fact that one of those affairs involved North himself.


Reasonably certain that his friend is innocent, North sets out to see
that justice is served. While doing so, he desperately tries to keep his
wife, his friend, and his law-enforcement colleagues from learning the
truth about his sexual indiscretions. As he gingerly negotiates his way
through this personal and professional nightmare, North discovers a web
of corruption and deceit involving the community’s richest and most
powerful men.

North is a flawed but intriguing character. Fans of mysteries with neat
denouements in which the guilty are punished and the virtuous triumph
may not like the ambiguity and rather bleak resolution of Body Contact.
Those who prefer a “noirish” twist or two will enjoy the
complications of the story and its troubled hero.