Butcher's Block
by J.D. Langlois

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“Blessed” with a near photographic memory, Arlo Becker has been called a lot of things over the course of a long and successful career, not all of them fit to print. The heaviest mantle, however, has always been “Butcher,” a decades-old moniker that still echoes clearly with the horrors of a Middle Eastern war zone that he’d barely managed to survive—echoes that (for someone like him) could never truly fade. Leveraging his experience as a war correspondent, he would soon become a driven investigative journalist and producer, with a reputation for hard-hitting stories, exposing corruption and criminality amidst the shadowy underground of the nation’s streets and halls of power alike. But when his professional integrity and stubbornness come face to face with the Catholic Church during an investigation into the horrors of the Residential School System, he soon finds himself disillusioned, unemployed, and wholly unaware that his biggest and most dangerous challenge yet was about to fall into his lap. It seems that the fifteen-year-old son of his good friend Cathy has gone missing in Estonia after flying there to visit his estranged father—a man with a somewhat shady backstory and a sinister past. With little to go on besides a mother’s concern and a very bad feeling, Arlo agrees to find him and bring him safely back home, growing more fiercely determined with every life-threatening twist and turn that follows. With his future prospects already in jeopardy after a disturbing medical prognosis, he’s got very little to lose, after all. But maybe … just maybe … he’s got one more story left to tell.

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Born in Ottawa, Ontario, Author J.D. Langlois moved to Toronto when he was twenty-two and after grinding away in the film & television industry for years, eventually established himself as an award-winning investigative-news editor and headlines producer for W5 on CTV, covering everything from politics and crime to heroism and disaster for over 25 seasons of the show. Butcher’s Block, his first published novel, is based (very loosely) on many of the stories he’s heard and characters he’s met through his professional life. When he’s not writing or editing, he enjoys reading medieval non-fiction, riding his stationary bike while watching a lot of TV, and travelling to rugged places like Iceland and the Canadian coasts. He also has a (no-longer-secret) passion for historical architecture, although his truest addiction is to coffee. Butcher’s Block is the first book in the “Arlo Becker Series.”

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J.D. Langlois