Freelance journalist Denny Durant arrives late to a Montreal nightclub. He believes he is covering a run-of-the-mill story about the town’s ongoing professional hockey strike and its impact on local business. In his personal life, things are not going well. He doesn’t feel like journalism matters in the modern landscape, his usually amicable ex is increasingly distant, and he worries about his relationship with his young daughters. So that night, when a dancer suspiciously turns up dead, a drug overdose, it is just the jolt he needs. The ideal journalist-subject match. As the story unravels, the work Denny cares about begins to matter again. Years of interview experience earn him the trust of beautiful Martine, the key witness. He finds the gall to collect on unpaid work, staving off his financial worries. He reconnects with a former colleague, now the founder of a fringe magazine, who also insists that no matter how bad the crisis, each opioid-related death matters and is worth pursuing. He summons a friend within the police department, who has intel on the cast of characters operating the nightclub. There are reconciliations more personal in nature, too.

At its best, C.J. Fournier’s THE FREELANCER shares the narrator’s inner monologue with the reader. Told in three parts, the readers’ familiarity with Denny as an indifferent freelancer slowly gives way to someone who has experienced more loss in his recent past than is initially let on. There was a detour in Afghanistan, a loss in Kabul, and a long time ago, another estrangement. It’s Denny’s self-talk, more than any other attempts at dialogue by the author, that exposes his emotional life and the trauma shaping his present outlook. As the first in a series, THE FREELANCER sets up future stories nicely. While the passage of time–overly explained and described in almost daily intervals, tends to slow the narrative down and Denny’s insights, almost always a wry comment on modern-day life and could be offered more frequently–no personal reconciliations are made too neatly. There is still plenty to know about Denny Durant.

In THE FREELANCER, C.J. Fournier’s debut, a well-told crime plot is used to humanize the male perspective in the stories we tell about fatherhood, relationships, and loss.

~E. Barton for IndieReader