The God Game (Dan Sharp 5) by Jeffrey Round

[Ulysses]

The God Game (Dan Sharp 5)
By Jeffrey Round
Dundurn Press, 2018
Five stars

These books just keep getting better. Or maybe I just keep getting pulled deeper into them and their richly drawn characters. Jeffrey Round is a wonderful writer.

The key word in this tense, tender and (as always) intelligent book is trust. The central motif in the twisted plot arc is a murder misinterpreted as a suicide, focused on a disgraced political figure who did nothing wrong. I was highly interested that the author decided to make this about Ontario provincial politics (read: state politics in, say, New York or New Jersey or California). Inspired (if that’s the right word) by a real Canadian political scandal, Jeffrey Round’s study of the underbelly of Toronto’s political machine is the embodiment of distrust and mistrust.

Dan Sharp, on the other hand, trusts his son, Kedrick, now about to graduate from university in Vancouver. Ked trusts his father. They both trust Ked’s mother Kendra. Dan – to my delight and surprise – trusts his now long-time boyfriend, Nick, the cop from the last book who turned out to be trustworthy. In fact, there’s a wedding afoot, which is given just enough attention to make it funny. Dan also trusts his best friend Donny, and Donny’s boyfriend Prabin, and Donny’s adopted son Lester.

The point of all this trust, I realized, is to contrast vividly – painfully – with the lack of trust that politicians, even supposedly “good ones,” deserve. As benign as we trust-deprived Americans think Canada is, we’re in for a shot of dark reality. I have to say I rather love it that the deepest fear and/or goal of the politicians in this book is that Canada will end up being more like the USA. Perish the thought.

The plot twists and surprises are plentiful here, and this book is as much of a page-turner as these generally rather low-key books can be. Since we all seem to living in something of an age of despair these days, Round manages to hold onto a remarkably positive attitude as a writer, a profound belief that things will turn out OK in the end.

The mournfulness I felt in the last book is till there, because Dan Sharp is a melancholy kind of guy. The saving grace is the love he feels that we can’t help but see in his character. As mistrustful as he is because of the horror of his own childhood, Dan wants to trust and be trusted; but sometimes cannot quite believe that he deserves either one. A visit to his former lover Trevor toward the end of the book reminds us that Dan did nothing wrong in that relationship. He also forgets that it wasn’t his fault, and I loved how the author used this gentle scene to set up the quiet finale that all but had me in tears