The Code

The cutthroat world of professional hockey is even more dangerous off the ice in the original detective thriller that inspired the new Global TV series Private Eyes.

Brad Shade has been just about everywhere hockey is played. He has ridden the buses in the minors, shared dressing rooms with the legends of the game, closed bars with guys destined for the Hall of Fame, and dropped the gloves with journeymen like himself who'll never get near it. And even though he's retired after fourteen years of bouncing around the league with more losses than wins and his net worth eroding, he's still living out of a suitcase and still taking numbers. That's his day job—scout for L.A., where someone in management owes him a favour from his playing days.     
     But when the brutally murdered body of coaching legend Red Hanratty turns up in the parking lot after an old-timers charity game (Shade goes scoreless, again), Shade's job of scouting the local phenom starts to overlap with investigating the killing of the kid's grizzled old coach.     
     When the killer goes after Shade's girlfriend, he finds out that guys don't stay in the league because they're good—they stick around because they're smart enough to know what needs to get done, and just ornery enough to actually do it.     
     From small-town rinks to the draft tables in the big league, G.B. Joyce introduces us to a character Canadians already love—the fourth-liner with a self-deprecating sense of humour and an oversized will to win—and weaves a story out of strands of resentment, greed, and fear that span generations and build to a surprising, thrilling conclusion.

G.B. JOYCE is the author of The Code and The Black Ace, the first two instalments of the Brad Shade mystery series. The books have been adapted by eOne for a television series premiering May 2016 on Global TV and starring Jason Priestley. His first piece of published fiction was "John Brisker's Greatest Game", a short story that appeared in ESPN The Magazine's fiction issue in 2011. Based in Toronto, he has written about sports and more important things for newspapers and magazines for thirty years.