THE JUDAS KISS. The Undercover Life of Patrick Kelly

Hardback. The story of Patrick Kelly - former RCMP undercover drug agent, suspected arsonist and fraud artist, and convicted wife murderer - is one of the most bizarre in the annals of Canadian crime, not least because Kelly has always maintained that his wife's fatal plunge off the 17th floor balcony of their luxury Toronto condominium was an accident. Undercover work is the most dangerous police assignment of all, for the temptations it lays in an agent's path can be truly irresistible. Soon after he was hired, Kelly crossed the thin blue line and, apparently with little sense of wrongdoing, accepted criminal assignments to smuggle cash, possibly drugs, and even the prototype of a fully silenced machine gun. Before long, Kelly was the prime suspect in the arson of his own house. He resigned from the Mounties within days of facing an internal discipline hearing, then, in March 1981, his wife died, spectacularly. Now the police were after him - with that special zeal they reserve for cops they believe have gone bad. A hair-raising account of Kelly's mysterious life, his financial shenanigans, his many love affairs, his escapades in money-smuggling and gun-running, and his hard years in jail, where ex-cops are marked men. Illus. 397pp. 8vo. h/back. From the library of true-crime writer, Wilfred Gregg, with his personal b/plate. F. in f. dw. A fairly heavy book which may require additional postage.