National Network for Equitable Library Service

“A stylish noir.” — The Globe and Mail on The Drop Zone

Ride the Lightning: A fast, powerful read full of action, twists, and dark humour. Vancouver is teeming with two-bit criminals, drug dealers, and gangsters, and dope dealer Miro seizes an opportunity to settle his score with bounty hunter Karl while working a major drug deal. What follows is a ride through Vancouver’s underbelly with a cast of characters whose ambition exceeds their criminal acumen. With dialogue that crackles on the page, Ride the Lightning introduces a new voice in crime fiction featuring grit, realism, and a comedic touch.

Move back through time into the alluring worlds of the Alchemists’ Council

The anticipated second book in Cynthea Masson’s series takes readers to Flaw Dimension, centuries before the events of book one. Rebel scribe Genevre, exploring secreted libraries with Dragonsblood pulsing through her young veins, accidentally discovers a 5th-Council manuscript with a long-forgotten alchemical formula whose implications could permanently transform both the Alchemists’ Council and the Rebel Branch.

A cinematic, fast-paced, and thrilling crime caper

Read the mystery series Booklist called “brimming with historical verisimilitude . . . with a richly detailed protagonist and a seriously compelling mystery.” This collection includes all three novels in this gripping police procedural series.

In this second mystery featuring Chief Inspector Peter Cammon, the veteran detective is called out of retirement once again. His assignment appears simple: travel to Canada to retrieve the body of a murdered Scotland Yard colleague. But Peter cannot resist delving into the oddities of the crime. His colleague was brutally attacked, run down by a car, and then dumped in a canal, yet the probable motive for the murder is bizarre: the theft of three letters from the U.S. Civil War era, one of them signed by the assassin John Wilkes Booth.

A dark and suspenseful debut. Detective T.J. Peterson has a problem, and it's not just how much he's drinking or the daily, silent, tormenting video calls from his estranged daughter. A Catholic priest has been bludgeoned to death in church, apparently by a symbol of his faith, and an unidentified woman's body had been found. He's barely holding it together. When a deranged teenager, a possible witness, crosses his path, he is propelled into a sleazy, violent world of underage prostitution, sexual abuse, and human trafficking as he pursues a merciless killer.

A lushly imagined novel that asks, “When do we ever really know ourselves?”

When Rebecca Laurelson is forced to leave her post as a trauma surgeon in an east African field hospital, she arrives at her aunt’s house on the Indian Ocean and is taken into the heart of a family she has never met before. It’s a world of all-night beach parties and constant cocktail receptions, and within its languorous embrace her attraction for her much younger cousin grows.

A fast and powerful crime novel full of action, vengeance, twists, and dark humour Grey Stevens took over the family business after his uncle passed away, and now he grows the best pot in Whistler. It's called Eight Miles High and the word on the street is it rivals anything on the planet. Happy to fly under the radar in this mountain playground, Grey just wants to take life easy and snowboard the cold months and bike the hot ones. But demand for his pot among the locals and tourists keeps growing.

Thirteen-year-old October Schwartz is new in town, short on friends, and the child of a clinically depressed science teacher. Naturally, she spends most of her time in the Sticksville Cemetery, which just happens to border her backyard. And that backyard just happens to be the home of five dead teenagers, each from a different era of the past: there’s the dead United Empire Loyalist! The dead escaped slave who made her way north via the Underground Railroad! The dead quintuplet!