Book Review

By Derryll White

Rotenberg, Robert (2025).  One Minute More.

                  “When in thy haunts two kindred spirits flee”. John Keats

This is Robert Rotenberg’s eighth novel. His stories get stronger with each work. Right up front, it is pleasurable to read a Canadian crime fiction/thriller writer who sets his work within the context of Canadian history and geography.

Rotenberg gives the reader the world in 1988, with Brian Mulroney as Prime Minister and Ronald Reagan as President.  It takes one back to a quieter time, even with the assassin prowling and the cops hunting.

The author is adept at gauging the action, maintaining strong forward momentum in the story even with the inevitable twists and turns of plot. There is a set timetable which demands adherence and makes it easy for the reader to track all the action.

This is a story with a lot of intrigue – a real thriller.  And it is the introduction to the strong Canadian detective character Ari Greene. If you have read any Robert Rotenberg pick this one up.  It fills in some blanks.

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Excerpt from the novel:

TORONTO – But he reveled in all the changes, both good and bad, he’d seen in Toronto since he moved here as an underweight Irish immigrant child of eight.

    Back then, Toronto was a dull, closed city.  No buses or streetcars ran on Sundays.  As a compromise the city fathers in their wisdom allowed the Toronto Maple Leafs, the city’s minor-league baseball team, to play on the “Lord’s Day,” but the games had to end by four o’clock in the afternoon.  He remembered going to a double-header with his father and the second game being shut down in the seventh inning.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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