Winnipeg Free Press: Nick Martin reviews One Minute More

A deadly assassin is killing her way across western Quebec and eastern Ontario, closing in on Toronto where she intends to murder Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Brian Mulroney and all the G7 leaders at their summit — as well as their potential BFF Mikhail Gorbachev.

Not the best way to sneak up quietly on her targets, one might think, but the assassin had almost been busted at the border, necessitating that she take extraordinarily evil measures to stay on the hunt.

Of course, that doesn’t happen, they all survive, which doesn’t make One Minute More any less intensely suspenseful (and no, sorry you’re so freaked out but that’s not a spoiler — you’re supposed to know these things about history).

The year is 1988 and it’s Canada’s turn to host the G7 summit. The final luncheon and photo op will take place at the venerable Hart House on the downtown campus of the University of Toronto.

Security is being handled by the major powers, it goes without saying, and they’re not about to listen to the local yokels, in this case Toronto’s police chief, who’s had a tip that there’ll be an assassination attempt, the aforementioned assassin infiltrating Canada through the U.S. That will surely offend American readers.

The chief assigns two young detectives, Ari Greene and Nora Bering, to follow up, whereupon Greene finds himself in Quebec and Vermont, where the border literally runs through a small town.

This being Toronto lawyer Robert Rotenberg’s eighth nifty police procedural set in Muddy York, we know that Greene and Bering are still around in 2025. Yes, (spoiler alert) they survive One Minute More. Read his other books and you’ll be so glad they survive.

Greene is right there as — no, not a word of what happens.

As things suddenly go all The Day of the Jackal, innocent people are dead, the killer is on the run and Greene is on her trail — through Montreal, its suburbs, Brockville, the Thousand Islands, lonely beaches hidden off Highway 401.

Rotenberg doesn’t take long to provide backstories on the victims, but what he divulges is tragic and heartbreaking; these are ordinary decent people, in the wrong place at the wrong time, whose deaths are loathsome.

It goes without saying that when authors fictionalize real events, we know how they turn out, but not necessarily how they did (or didn’t) come to pass. Or almost didn’t — how do we know for sure Rotenberg made all of this up?

Robert Harris another who’s especially skilled at creating characters who may not survive as they interact with real people and events, or who may play roles history never noticed for good or bad. Be it Fatherland, Archangel, Munich, Enigma or The Ghost, we may know the outcome, but not the parts of its sum.

Greene and Bering are relentless in their pursuit to thwart the killer — Rotenberg barely lets them stop for breath.

Younger readers, let’s say those under 40, may scratch their heads at police officers just beginning to carry enormous portable phones that constantly drain batteries and often fail to work, DNA evidence that’s just a rumour and cops carrying lots of quarters to use pay phones.

Pay phones? Ask your grandparents.

Golly, Robert Rotenberg is good. And Canadian.

Retired Free Press reporter Nick Martin noticed how close the crucial events that didn’t (or maybe did) occur were to the day he turned 40. He’s trying to remember.