National Network for Equitable Library Service

"It's been a long time now, nearly two years since we met at that party." "Yeah," Tessie said bitterly, "and nearly five years since I was a clever little girl who thought she'd found a way to make a hundred dollars. There was only going to be one time. I needed the dough. Two months later I didn't have an excuse any more and I was still doing it. Still am." A blindingly blonde woman walks into private detective Mike Garfin’s downtown Montreal office, complaining that she’s being followed by a man.

It was cold; bitterly paralysingly cold. There was a dampness in the air that bit into the marrow of your bones and stayed there. The red in the thermometer was below zero and still dropping steadily, and the weather forecasts offered no immediate hope of a let up. The city lay rigid under the stiffening blanket of snow. The air as you breathed it felt solid. A raw novel of sex and drugs in the years just before rock’n’roll, Hot Freeze moves from the highest Westmount mansion to the lowest Montreal gambling joint and nightclubs.

Teenagers accidentally discover the body of a university student at the bottom of the abandoned Wellington Tunnel. When the apparent suicide turns out to be a murder, Lieutenant Detective Toni Damiano, guilt-ridden from her last case, finds herself investigating a chilling trail of lies and deceit, daring love and betrayal.

A novel about Montreal during the not-so-halcyon era of a couple of decades ago when gangs and girls made rum-running and slot machines big business.from the 1950 editionRonald J. Cooke’s second novel, The Mayor of Côte St. Paulis the tale of a struggling writer living in Depression-era Montreal. Winnipegger Dave Manley arrived in the city thinking that its rich atmosphere will inspire his fiction, but was met by a stream rejection slips. His luck turns, for good and bad, when he meets Cherie, a looker from Lunenberg who does dirty work for a crime boss known as The Mayor.

Literary agent Madison Holmes is brutally attacked in her condo and left for dead, days after she sent rejection letters to four would-be authors. Lieutenant-Detective Toni Damiano catches this high profile case to the chagrin of the detectives in her division.Unfazed and confident, Damiano is determined to track down the vicious assailant and close her first “lead” case. Seven hours in, she has the murder weapon – a boxed manuscript. “All this over a book?”

Véhicule Press launches its Ricochet Series of vintage mysteries with The Crime on Cotes des Neiges—a hardboiled detective novel set in Montreal originally published in 1951. At the centre of this novel, and two others by David Montrose, is the hard-drinking, hard-working private dick, Russell Teed.First Edition 1951 back cover: There were two blondes and a brunette. One of them had killed John Sark. Detective Sergeant Framboise thought it was Inez Sark. Inez had left her parents’ thirty-five room shack in Westmount to marry John Sark, the biggest bootlegger Montreal had ever known.

By the author of The Crime on Cotes des Neiges, this is the second title in the Véhicule Press Ricochet series of hard-boiled detective novels set in Montreal. Originally published in 1952, Murder Over Dorval follows the investigations of hard-drinking, seasoned private dick, Russell Teed. First Edition back cover:In one hand she held a plane ticket for Montreal, in the other, a wad of greenbacks. She was a gorgeous looking redhead. For the sake of her lovely green eyes, Russell Teed took the plane and the money.

A musical cold case has Cullen and Cobb back on the beat. On February 28, 1965, a young singer named Ellie Foster stepped into the alley behind The Depression, a Calgary folk club where she shared the bill with Joni Anderson, later to become famous as Joni Mitchell. During a cigarette break in the back alley, Ellie was forced into a car and the musicians with her were shot and killed. The investigation that followed turned up no sign of the kidnappers, and Ellie Foster was never seen again.

Au cours d’une fête organisée pour ses 30 ans de service dans la police, le sergent-détective Roméo Dubuc apprend que le populaire député Marc-André Plamondon vient d’être assassiné, d’une manière sordide, le soir même de la fondation de son nouveau parti politique, le PLIQ. Très vite, Roméo Dubuc, son fidèle comparse Lucien Langlois et la journaliste Manon Pouliot découvriront que la popularité du député dérange bien du monde, à commencer par ses proches collaborateurs.

Un journaliste établi à Vancouver profite d’un séjour à Québec pour faire des recherches, à la demande d’une amie, sur le passé de son aïeul chinois. Il découvrira un visage méconnu de sa ville natale : celui des sépultures de la communauté chinoise et d’un possible trafic d’ossements, celui d’un tunnel inachevé et des marginaux qui s’y retrouvent et celui des tragiques incendies, nombreux, qui ont stigmatisé la vieille capitale.