Saints Rest by Luke Francis Beirne

The term “Grit Lit” had its twentieth birthday three years ago. And like “Neo Noir,” a literary cousin a few decades older, the term is a bit of a catch-all applied to moodily stylized representations where shadow eclipses light and violence is a given. Ethics? Situational. Justice? Notional. Conversation? Clipped, accusatory, threatening, disgruntled, transactional, and half-truthful at best. The streets are mean and buildings ramshackle; needless to say, human relations quickly turn predatory, broken, abusive, fractious, mercenary, and volatile.

For his first two novels New Brunswick writer Luke Francis Beirne looked back—to postwar London (Foxhunt) and Ireland in the ‘70s (Blacklion). While his latest, a notably slim novella, could be mistaken for a volume of poems, there’s no mistaking its contemporary grittiness. Set in Saint John, where sunshine is rare and darkness is “distant but ever-present” as it looms “over the uneven rise of flattop roofs,” Saints Rest showcases Beirne’s ease with the textures of misery.

As the small city surrounded by “a never-ending sheet of grey” awakens, narrator Frank Cain is meeting at the Cormier Agency with his PI cohort Randy. They’re going over a current fraud case. In walks Malory Fleet, a “worn, beaten” woman wearing a stained and torn coat. Two years earlier, Fleet’s ne’er-do-well son (a reputed “scumbag”) was shot to death. His young wife disappeared shortly after that.

A missing person’s case? Cain’s intrigued.

Trained as a cop and recently hired as security in a remote camp, in Saint John former New Glasgonian, Cain has worked insurance claims halfheartedly. But he met a woman, Madison, who convinced him to stay.

Set in Saint John, where sunshine is rare and darkness is “distant but ever-present” as it looms “over the uneven rise of flattop roofs,” Saints Rest showcases Beirne’s ease with the textures of misery.

“When she left,” Cain deadpans, “habit kept me.” He continues to scrape by.

Recalling a fight, years back, that meant “nothing good for the guy who went down,” Cain relates a symptom of his exhaustion: “Nothing surprises me anymore. This would be a tough job otherwise.” Shoulder to shoulder with Dave Wakeland, Sam Wiebe’s PI antihero in Sunset and Jericho and The Last Exile, a romantic despite the inequities he witnesses each and every day in Vancouver, Cain appears beaten down and cynical. He’s world-weary, verging on nihilistic.

As he leaves a bar, he sees a man being loaded into an ambulance. The culprit? “It was this city, this world.” A beat later, he expands his vision: “I’ve since learned that every city is the same. Some just hide it better than others.”

He’s a mess: impulsive, obsessive, a well of unarticulated feelings in a city whose sights—from an apartment that smells like “cigarettes and a litterbox” to a man “lost to a perpetual state of decay—actively reinforce his anguished sense of the world.

Beirne’s portrait of Saint John is no love letter, obviously. The place is dreary in a wintry way, rundown, and, a well of hopelessness where children live “in squalor: mold, mice, methamphetamine.”

Naturally, the missing persons case deepens a despair with roots in a rough childhood, where Cain remembers, “There might be sirens. There might be blood.”

Worse, perhaps, his experiences—in particular, those that involve his ex and a cop—further deform his response to a corrupt, unjust world. His punitive bouts of self-analysis don’t help either.

As the novella, which is short enough to read as a short story, races to its resolution, Beirne leaves his troubled soul of a narrator feeling “an inexplicable sense of calm.” The nirvana he’s reached will definitely not be the one readers will expect, even though the author drops clues all along the way.

Luke Francis Beirne was born in Donegal, Ireland, and lives on the Wolastoqey land of Saint John, New Brunswick. His first novel, Foxhunt (Baraka Books, 2022), was a finalist for the 2022 Foreword INDIES award and selected as one of The Miramichi Reader’s Very Best novels of 2022. His second novel, Blacklion (Baraka Books, 2023), was selected by CBC as one of the novels to read in 2023 and shortlisted by the Writer’s Federation of New Brunswick for the 2023 Best Novel Award. His stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Counterpunch, NB Media Co-op, Hamilton Arts & Letters, and CrimeReads. Beirne’s work has been stylistically compared to Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, Frederick Forsyth, and John le Carre. Saints Rest is his third novel.

Publisher: Baraka Books (April 22, 2025)
Paperback: 8″ H x 5″ W x 1″ L | 180 pp
ISBN: 9781771863797

Brett Josef Grubisic

Brett Josef Grubisic resides on Salt Spring Island, BC, where he's currently at war with his sixth novel. Previous novels include The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck.