After a five-year absence, one of Canada’s favourite sleuthing sons makes a welcome and long overdue reappearance. Benny Cooperman, the epitome of low-key Canadian small-town private investigation, is having trouble adapting to his lady love’s trip to Europe and the unwelcome changes affecting the eating establishments of his Grantham hometown. These are merely the latest symptoms of a deeper personal malaise, from which he finds a neat escape in the form of a temporary assignment in Toronto acting as a bodyguard to a high-school beauty he lusted after silently, and in vain, years before.

Although Benny admits to lacking the requisite combat training and armament skills normally associated with such a position, Vanessa Moss – ambitious corporate climber and currently head of entertainment at the National Television Corporation – will tolerate no argument. Swayed by promised overpayment and implied sexual promises, Cooperman takes the case and moves to Toronto. There he blunders through the corporate maze at NTC (where he’s introduced as Vanessa’s new executive assistant and fools nobody) as he tries to discover whether Vanessa’s recent brush with death was as an intended target or accidental intruder. His search leads to some very strange goings-on in Muskoka’s high-end cottage country and some unexpected links to NTC.

Engel has chosen, for the first time in the series, to insert real characters and places into the narrative. The result is a nicely wrought mystery with some acerbic observations about the bureaucracies and in-fighting that infest large corporations and some nifty street-level descriptions of Toronto.