Prisoners of Circumstance: A South Scarborough Story

Journalist Roger Williams is an alcoholic and drug addict and he’s 419 days clean and sober.However, today is the day he could relapse; the gates of his personal hell have opened, unleashing the demons which drove him to addiction in the first place, dragging him back to the place where it all began, heaping more tragedy into his already bruised and battered life.Like many of the characters in this story, he’s a Prisoners of Circumstance but it’s not as bleak as it appears in this modern twist on the noir genre. While the story starts from a place of darkness it evolves to ultimately illustrate love is the light at the end of all our dark tunnels.Williams hasn’t been back to his old neighbourhood in South Scarborough for years. In fact, he’s religiously avoided it, haunted by the sudden death of his father and the subsequent brutal murder of his mother. When the man who saved his life and set him on the road to recovery is himself murdered, Williams confronts his darkest nightmares and sets out with a new and fierce purpose to bring some form of justice to bear.The narrative traces a journey starting from desolation leading to the affirmation of life and renewal, revealing the dark underbelly of South Scarborough, itself a character like the mixed ensemble populating the story: a gay cop, a lover, a sex worker, a local cocaine dealer and a double dealing criminal hustler. Add in Greek gangsters and ruthless Albanian drug dealers assembling properties as part of the unstoppable march of condos across Toronto to ultimately launder money to add crackle to the tightly woven plot .On the surface it’s a noir crime yarn in the style of Elmore Leonard with snappy dialogue and staccato prose. You can almost hear the keys clacking as a deeper story emerges, one of hope.This is not all fiction. Many of the events and characters are true, with fictional narrative woven between those threads.And to be sure, this is not a procedural story but a literary crime novel which explores cultural concepts of tragedy and redemption, love and justice.On a deeper, more literary level, Prisoners of Circumstance is about life and death and while the latter may seem the end of the story it is not always so.As spring unfolds in South Scarborough Roger is also set to be reborn and find that instead of dwelling on the deaths in his life, he can focus on the lives that guided him and made him who he is and in doing so break free of his circumstantial prison to find the path of love, redemption and freedom.And maybe justice in one form or another. Read more