At a psychiatric hospital in the 1980s patients formed what they called The Adjustment League to protect themselves against the depredations of a corrupt and abusive staff. Prompted by a mysterious summons from his past, a message from a fellow patient on a locked ward twenty years before, the hero of the novel--a man known only as "the Super"--embarks on a series of adjustments, his word for the personal interventions he conducts on behalf of the powerless to even the playing field. But what begins as a discovery of the neglect by a privileged Toronto family of their Alzheimer's-afflicted mother, opens out into much larger and more systematic crimes. The first in a new noir trilogy, The Adjustment League offers up a grittily gothic examination of privilege and power on the mean streets of contemporary Toronto. Working in the 6-8 week windows of what The Super calls hyper-time--the periods of near-sleepless hyper-awareness and activity which precede his own mental collapse--he tries to balance the scales of justice while seeking atonement for a crime from his own past: the maiming of his own daughter during a period of psychological distress. Part bi-polar detective, part avenging angel, The Super is a noir anti-hero like none other.
The Adjustment League