Publisher's Weekly
This plodding prequel to Aubert's Arthur Ellis Award-winning series (Free Reign, etc.) takes Ellis Portal back to his youth when he studied law at the University of Toronto, years before an unexplained scandal destroyed his career on the bench. Asked to accompany friend and fellow student Gleason Adams on a midnight mission to the city morgue, Portal finds himself immersed in the abrupt disappearance of a female corpse midway through an autopsy. Portal drags his feet in helping Adams solve this inexplicable although not very compelling conundrum, because of his desire to further his own law career by interning for a respected jurist. Against an awkwardly applied backdrop of such '60s events as civil rights marches, the New York World's Fair and Beatles concerts, we follow Ellis on his half-hearted search for Adams's mysterious connection to the victim. After a gloomy opening scene and a long winter of investigation, the happily-ever-after ending somehow doesn't seem to fit the grim events and setting of this disappointing tale. (Oct. 1) Forecast: The unmade bed on the jacket is an odd choice, as there's little or no sex in the book, nor is sleeping a theme. The novel would've been better served by art that reflected 1960s social issues. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews
Ellis Portal's fourth adventure is a prequel that takes him back to the days before he was a street person, a disgraced judge, even a rising young lawyer. Back all the way, in fact, to 1965, when the Beatles rule, Martin Luther King is organizing a march from Selma to Montgomery, and Vietcong terrorists have bombed the US embassy in Saigon. Ellis, né Angelo Portalese, a Toronto law student eager to snare a coveted judicial internship with Magistrate B. Sheldrake Tuppin, proposes to research the legal status of Billy Johnson, an American-born Canadian Cree determined to resist the draft without renouncing his American citizenship. But Ellis's friend Gleason Adams has other ideas about the internship. He wants to look into the case of a woman whose corpse mysteriously disappeared from the morgue minutes after the two students arrived to observe the beginning of the postmortem. Nor is the cadaver all that's vanished; so have any records that the woman was ever there, along with a pair of distinctive wedding rings inscribed "If you love me, leave me by dying" that Gleason himself purloined from the corpse and took home. And the disappearances continue with Billy and Gleason, whose upscale background is clearly hiding painful secrets. Probing, sensitive, and rewarding. Despite the eminently predictable dénouement, Ellis's followers will treasure this glimpse of what made him the complicated man he turned into (The Ferryman Will Be There, 2001, etc.).