Lucky Strike is a light-hearted laugh-out-loud mystery with a cast of characters who epitomize life Down East. Eric Spratt, a conservative accountant from Toronto, is forced to flee to the remote Eastern Shore of Nova Scotia and there, become Charles Trenchant, reclusive writer. He knows that anonymity and discretion are the only weapons he has to protect himself from the retribution of the Mafia dons whom he helped to send to jail. Surely, fift ...
As if it weren’t bad enough being a failed romance writer with no sex life, poor Fiona Silk has to cope with the spectacularly embarrassing demise of her old lover, the poet, Benedict Kelly. It’s exactly the sort of thing people notice in St. Aubaine, Quebec, a picturesque bilingual tourist town of two thousand. Now the police start getting nasty, the media vans stay parked on her lawn and the neighbours’ tongues keep wagging in both official la ...
In the second Camilla MacPhee mystery, it’s now forty below in Canada’s capital, but victims’ advocate Camilla is feeling the heat. When a savage serial batterer goes on the rampage looking for revenge against his former girlfriend, the terrified woman turns to Camilla and Justice for Victims for help. But a sudden change of fortune causes her client to really feel the chill. Camilla wades into the investigation, now one of murder, and gets a fr ...
There is a killer at work in the sleepy village of Cedar Falls. The peaceful order of puppet-maker Polly Deacon’s back-to-nature rural life is violently interrupted when she finds her best friend Francy’s abusive husband lying dead in the dump with a hole in his chest. What’s worse, Francy can’t remember what happened the night of the murder. The cops soon get involved…and in more ways than one, as Polly finds herself falling for hunky officer M ...
It’s Labour Day, Camilla’s favourite weekend of the year. She’s planning to relax and ponder what’s happening in her relationship with policman Sgt. Ray Deveau. She’s emphatically not planning to get involved in anything that means trouble. No wonder the news that an old acquaintance has had an accident comes as a surprise. There must be some mistake. By the time Camilla unearths Laura’s connection to a violent revolutionary group active two dec ...
Being promotions director of a large shopping mall isn’t the most stress-free job on the planet, but Jenny Turnbull enjoys it and is darn good at it. But her job becomes quite a bit more gruesomely stressful when an unseen gunman goes on a spree in a bloody food court massacre during her special Hallowe’en promotion. And the situation gets totally out of hand when it turns out that the surviving victim, whose life is hanging by a thread in hospi ...
Winston Patrick, a successful lawyer but dissatisfied with his career defending the downtrodden of Vancouver’s criminal world, trades in the courtroom for the high school classroom. Soon Winston’s past life meets his present when a student accuses a fellow colleague of a teacher-student love affair. Reluctantly, Winston agrees to provide legal defence, but the case takes an even uglier turn: the student is murdered, making her alleged lover the ...
Remembrance Day is a proud day for Camilla MacPhee’s good friend, Mrs. Violet Parnell, one of five thousand Canadian women to go overseas during World War II. But the next day she has vanished. Camilla, with only a few letters and documents to guide her, follows her friend to Tuscany, chasing though historic towns, across high promontories and along steep mountain roads. Vanishing old partisans and Allied aircraft crash sites keep Camilla hoppin ...
The third Polly Deacon novel finds our heroine in the unlikely (and uncomfortable) job of designing a mascot (Kountry Kow) for a new mega-grocery store, despite vitriolic opposition by local merchants, including her aunt. This is nasty enough, but when allegations of municipal corruption arise concerning the sale of the property on which the store will stand, Polly’s sleuthing instincts take over, to the usual chagrin of her sometimes boyfriend, ...
