Welcome to Lady Jail: a nest of killers, and not all of them are getting out alive . . .
Quebec, 1994. Fraud artist Abigail, the newest arrival at the Joliette Institution for Women, is struggling to adjust to the prison’s communal quarters. Her fellow inmates only give out the bare bones of their crimes, and it’s quite the roll call. Doi took a hatchet to her own daughter. Malka poisoned her husband. And that’s just for starters. Abigail keeps her head down, does her best to make friends with the band of killers, tries to survive.
But on an ordinary, quiet day, the extraordinary happens: a prisoner is found face-down in a toilet stall, a strangulation wire around her neck. Trouble, Abigail realizes, is ahead.
Sergeant-Detective Émile Cinq-Mars is summoned from Montreal to investigate. He put Abigail away – and now she’s the prime suspect. But other, darker, forces are interested in Abigail, and Émile interferes at his own peril. For as he’ll soon discover, in Lady Jail, nothing is as it seems . . .
John Farrow is the pseudonym of Trevor Ferguson, a Canadian novelist and playwright with eight previous novels in the Émile Cinq-Mars thriller series and seven literary novels under his own name. Booklist in New York has called his crime series the best of our time. Die Zeit in Germany has called it the best of all time.