FINALIST for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Crime Novel

"With nods to John Le Carré, Work of Idle Hands is rich with colourful context, so much so you can almost smell the cigarette smoke and taste the blood." — Winnipeg Free Press

"Work of Idle Hands gives the reader spies, lies and coverups... Platz raises uncomfortable questions about Westen complaisance in atrocities in distant corners of the world; questions still relevant today... The reader gets the feeling that Platz, who writes under a pseudonym, knows first-hand what he's writing about. " — Uptown

"The background material — political shenanigans, secret groups, clandestine meetings, CIA intervention, government approved assassination — is detailed and convincing... This political thriller has much to say about the moral ambiguities involved in the portrayal of good and evil." – Canadian Book Review Annual

If you had the opportunity, could you kill someone to prevent murder on a far greater scale? Quinfell knew he would never stop. The world had lost its balance, it needed a correction. In the very beginning, when the idea first surrounded him, he thought killing a man, even an evil man, would prove impossible. All of his training, first in the seminary, then with Amnesty, stressed the sanctity of human life. He had never been a soldier. He had never needed to kill someone for his country, or in self-defence, or to prevent a crime. But crouched on the hill above the farm on that moonless African night, looking through the rifle sight at the fat general swaggering towards his long black limousine... In this gripping new political thriller, former Ottawa civil servant Jonathon Platz casts his novelistic eye on the brutal government repressions that rocked South America in the 1970s.