Synopses & Reviews
Brad Shade has been just about everywhere hockey is played. He has ridden the buses in the minors, shared dressing rooms with the legends of the game, closed bars with guys destined for the Hall of Fame, and dropped the gloves with journeymen like himself who’ll never get near it. Now that he’s retired after fourteen years of bouncing around the league, he’s living out of a suitcase and scouting for Los Angeles, where someone in management owes him a favour from his playing days.
But when the brutally murdered body of coaching legend Red Hanratty turns up in the parking lot after an old-timers charity game, Shade’s job of scouting the local phenomenon starts to overlap with investigating the killing of the kid’s grizzled old coach.
From small-town rinks to the draft tables in the big league, G.B. Joyce introduces us to a character with a self-deprecating sense of humour and an oversized will to win—and weaves a story out of strands of resentment, greed, and fear that span generations and build to a surprising, thrilling conclusion.
Review
Praise for The Code:
“One of this continents master craftsmen of sporting prose”…as fine a writer as can be found in any field.”
--Sports Illustrated
“This thriller has enough juice to satisfy those whove never been to a rink.”
--Library Journal
“[Joyces] knowledgeable, engagingly cynical perspective on hockey should prove compelling even for those readers with no interest in the sport.”
--Publishers Weekly
"Part CSI, part L.A. Law, part Hockey Night in Canada—Gare Joyce deserves a championship ring for his uncanny portrayal of Brad Shade, the earthy, educated hockey scout sleuth. This is sports writing, crime writing, and just plain writing as good as it gets." —Roy MacGregor
"The Code is surely one of the great 'insider' fictions of the professional hockey world. Funny and full of dirty fights both on and off the ice, it delivers an astringent look into big league machinations and the human costs of playing the game."
—Andrew Pyper, author of The Guardians
“For an amateur-detective story to work, the main character, the non-cop investigator, has to be well-drawn and engaging. Shade is both, and it's his clever rapscallion personality that propels the story.” —Winnipeg Free Press
Synopsis
Hatred, blackmail, and murdera Brad Shade hat trick. The Black Ace reunites us with our favorite, savvy fourth-liner, with plot twists, wisecracks, and an ending that could only come from G.B. Joyce.
Thanks to Shades work at the NHL draft last season, he gets to hold on to his job as scout for L.A.at least for now. But a journeymans work is never done. Shade is checking out small-town talent with his old friend and teammate Chief.” But when they learn of the suicide of an old teammate from their playing days in L.A., they take a sometimes violent detour through the dark side of a small town with no shortage of secrets it wants kept at almost any cost.
About the Author
G.B. Joyce is the author of six books of sports non-fiction, most recently The Devil and Bobby Hull. He has worked for ESPN since 2003 and before that was a sports columnist at The Globe and Mail. Gare worked for a year as a scout for the Columbus Blue Jackets while researching a previous book.