The the Way of Transgressors

The miscreants and murderers who live in the underworld of 19th-century Toronto said that George Porter had a heart as black as a sweep's face. Over the years, he's recorded the faces of the guilty in pen and ink, sketching them as compulsively as he investigated their crimes. In September 2007, a backhoe uncovered a mass grave while excavating what had been the exercise yard of the old Toronto Don Jail. A total of fifteen bodies were discovered, the remains of inmates hanged on the prison's gallows between 1872 and 1930. Mysteries to be solved, lives to be imagined, crimes to be dissected.