The Forth Life

He killed for three organizations. He answered to none. When they came for the people he loved, he opened his mouth.Frédéric "Fredo" Costa is thirty-eight years old, a Portuguese-Québécois kid from a north-end street that no one comes back from, and one of the ten most-wanted men in the province of Ville-Sainte-Croix. He does not gamble. He does not use. He drives at exactly the speed limit and he signals every turn. And between 2010 and 2018 he kills — quietly, professionally, and for three separate branches of the city's criminal ecology — at least six men.Then the Sûreté Provinciale finds his DNA on an unfired cartridge in a revolver he threw into a recycling bin eleven months earlier, and the whole architecture of his careful, invisible life comes apart at one o'clock in the morning.What follows is a twenty-eight-month prison silence. A trial without cross-examination. A contract of one hundred thousand dollars placed, from a maximum-security wing, on the life of the crime reporter covering him. Two childhood friends murdered on the outside in twelve days. And, at four-forty-seven in the morning, a Sûreté Provinciale helicopter lifting off from a federal penitentiary with Costa aboard.THE FOURTH LIFE is a novel of Quebec organized crime in the tradition of the great continental crime writers — sparse, atmospheric, deeply moral. Inspired by the recognizable shape of a real recent chapter of Canadian criminal history.For readers of Don Winslow, Pierre Lemaitre, Ian Rankin, and any lover of literary crime who has ever wondered what a hitman thinks about at four in the morning on the last night of his old life. Ville-Sainte-Croix Crime Novel. Book One.