Let It Ride is John McFetridge’s third book in the Toronto police precinct/motorcycle club series and also his hands-down fucking best.  The world of this series just keeps getting bigger and the comparisons to The Wire just keep getting more apt.  No one in crime today is tackling the genre with such authenticity, ambition, scope, and balls – and that’s the not the least fucking bit hyperbolic, dear reader.  But then again, that shit would be old news to you if you’d read his first two novels, Dirty Sweet and Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, already (which, you know, you should do, like, fucking yesterday).

The central story of Let It Ride involves Detroit gunrunner Get and Toronto’s rub-and-tug princess Sunitha looking to rob the Saints of Hell’s massive gold stash and escape the life for good.  Get is getting pressure from his mom and uncle back home to help take their operation to the next level, make it something approaching the scope of what the Saints have cooking.  As Get is allowed access into the Saints’ business via his old war buddy J.T., he starts feeling that maybe going worldwide is not the direction he wants his life to take.  Sunitha has been moonlighting lately with a lesbian couple, the three of them taking off rich white ladies at fancy (non-handjob related) day spas and then selling their jewelry to J.T. at a cost far shittier than what it’s worth.  These two disillusioned souls fall hard for each other during Get’s tour of Toronto, and soon enough they’re starting to put together a plan.  But the Saints fucking own Toronto, if not all of Canada, and can two crazy kids really pull one over on the infamous motorcycle club and expect to get away with their lives?

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[Let it Ride was published in Canada as Swap]

With some books if a reader doesn’t like a particular aspect (the characters were thin, the writing weak, the story implausible, etc) it is seen as a reflection of the book rather then the reader. But then there are other books, and Let it Ride is one of them, where a readers reactions are a reflection on them. To say you don’t like a John McFetridge novel is to say that you don’t like to be challenged; that you like things spoon-fed to you; that you prefer simplicity. A McFetridge novel won’t do these things and is so much more because of it.

The closest comparison for John McFetridge’s style of writing is a season of The Wire. One of the novels is akin to one whole season. And his unwillingness to hold the hand of the reader on almost any level is almost like a novel embodiment of something that David Simon said in an interview once, “Fuck the average reader”.

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