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Bullets squared everything. Wilson left his old boss alive in exchange for a clean slate. Wilson held up his end of the bargain and stayed off the grid for two years. Two years of peace until a man came calling. The man brought a gun and a woman in his trunk. Thousands of miles from home, Wilson learns that the city doesn't let go so easily. The city is more than bricks; it is a machine running on the blood of hard men and women. The hardest man in the city remembers Wilson and he will stop at nothing to get him back.

As a long, hot Saskatchewan summer dawns, Darby Swank's life is forever changed when she finds her beloved aunt floating dead in a lake. All at once, her blinders are lifted and she sees the country lifestyle she's always known in a whole new way, with hidden pain and anguish lurking behind familiar faces, and violence forever threatening to burst forth, like brushfire smouldering and dormant under the muskeg. With her first novel, Lisa Guenther lays bare familial bonds, secret histories and the healing potential of art.

The Deal: Jake Morgan, ex-cop, gambler, and casino dealer, reluctantly agrees to keep an eye on his boss’s great-niece during her visit to Vegas.

When someone keeps trying to accost them and the bruises escalate with each encounter, Jake realizes that it isn’t a simple case of mistaken identity. To make things worse, his precocious Britney look-a-like charge has a crush on him, leaving Jake in a quandary as he tries to unravel a mystery that began fifty years earlier . . .

The forests around Dockerty, Newry County, hide many secrets.

Some were never meant to be unearthed, one is still waiting to be buried. At the edge of the woods near the Warren farm, a man hangs in a tree. Two arrows pin him to the trunk.

“Hunting accident?” Orwell wondered.

The sergeant shook his head. “One in the belly, maybe. Two in the belly, that’s pretty good shooting.”

The joke? Toronto thinks it’s the centre of some multicultural universe, always bragging about how people come from every part of the world to live there. The punch line? Some of them are coming to commit crimes.

So yeah, Sharon MacDonald’s got a problem — Ray; he’s too good-looking. But she knows what everybody knows. The whole world might be coming here, but this is nowhere.

Jake Morgan just can't seem to win. In Drawing Dead, the Las Vegas poker dealer and ex-cop is dealt a hand by his casino boss and forced to play. A beautiful high roller, sick of her husband, takes a prescription of gambling and gamboling in Vegas to cure herself. She finds her medicine – Morgan. He reluctantly plays hotel gigolo, and ends up in her suite. He's just beginning some of his best “under-the-cover” moves when an assassin enters with a cure-all for the woman by popping two lead pills into her head.

In the middle of the afternoon on a busy downtown Toronto street a man is shot in the head behind the wheel of his SUV. The killer drives away before the light changes. It could be road rage, or it could be a random act of violence. It could be, but it isn't. What it is, is opportunity. For everyone involved. The witness, Roxanne Keyes, a real estate agent trying desperately to lease out space in unwanted office space, recognizes the killer — a man who had once looked to rent with her. She figures with this kind of leverage he'll be a lot more interested now.

World class poker players are being strangled in their hotel rooms, and Clare is given her second big assignment: to pose as a poker player in a major televised tournament, befriend the suspects, and find the killer in their midst. Her cover role? A trust fund princess named Tiffany who thinks the poker tour is a better idea than college. Though Clare would prefer to wear jeans and get her hands dirty, posing as Tiffany helps her infiltrate the inner circle quickly.

There’s a killer on the premises of Christy Burke’s pub in Dublin, according to graffiti spray-painted on the wall. Father Brennan Burke, Christy’s grandson, is asked to investigate the vandalism. Brennan has been tending bar a bit himself and is not all that keen on probing into the lives of his clientele. But he has little choice once a body is found and the property investigation becomes a murder inquiry.

The mayor falls down dead in the middle of a speech, and a university secret society promptly claims credit for the murder.

Clare Vengel is given her first undercover assignment: to pose as a student and penetrate the society. She’s a mechanic in her spare time, and thinks book smarts are for people who can’t handle the real world. Instead of infiltrating the club, she alienates a popular professor, and quickly loses the respect of police superiors.