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Montreal journalist Lou Sabatino, under witness protection after nearly being gunned down by the Mafia, is sucked into the quirky world of a conniving Russian dominatrix who has secretly recorded herself putting the whip to the bare bottom of a high-ranking federal cabinet minister.

It’s the scoop of the century, but too hot a potato — if Lou breaks the story, he risks exposing himself to the mercies of the Mafia. Instead, he shows the video to Green Party leader Margaret Blake. The video is leaked, and Margaret is sued by the minister for $50 million.

Winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Mystery Novel, 1998. Winner of the Dashiell Hammett Award, 1998. Arthur Beauchamp, one of Vancouver's most heralded criminal lawyers, has moved to a quiet island off the British Columbia coast. He's trying to recover from a marriage gone sour, but his retirement is interrupted by his former law partners--they want Arthur to take charge of the defence trial of Jonathan O'Donnell, the acting dean of the law school.

The year is 1980. Three struggling, ambitious young lawyers set up their own practice. Partner Carrie Barr, fresh from her success defending a drifter charged as the notorious Midnight Strangler, takes on the case of a suave hit man who proves to be far more dangerous — and alluring — than she imagined. Carrie finds herself drawn into a web of terror; a rogue police operation, a ruthless drug lord, and a series of brutal murders threaten to tear apart their fledgling firm. Meanwhile, the Midnight Strangler is still at large. Has he chosen Carrie as his next victim?

Slander is set in rainy, foggy Seattle. The narrator, Liz Finnegan, is a brash, bright, petite women’s rights lawyer. She’s 26, and a defender of abortion clinics (they’re being bombed by “Christian” rednecks), abused women, and related liberal causes. Her nemesis is a handsome, long-haired judge (Vandergraaf) whom she publicly savages, at a press scrum, for giving a slap-on-the-wrist sentence to a white-collar rapist. Along comes a new client, a middle-class woman who has gone back to university as a mature student.

The sixth novel in the acclaimed Arthur Beauchamp series

Everything is going well for Arthur Beauchamp in his early middle age. Life is so good for the top-notch defence lawyer that, in a moment of career restlessness, he decides to switch sides, just the once, and prosecute a young man charged with murdering a clown. Beauchamp is confident he can prove Randolph Skyler is guilty. Confident, but still worried and surprisingly blind to how precarious the evidence is — and, worse, to the fissures opening in his personal life.

Be careful what you wish for, his mother used to say. Yet how many times has Monty Collins wished for a client who is intelligent, articulate and tattoo-free? Now he has one, but it’s not long before his mother’s warning comes back to haunt him. Father Brennan Burke is the prime suspect in the killing of a foxy young girl whose body was found carved with a religious sign, a sign that points straight to the priest.

Lawyer Foster Cobb prosecutes the mysterious Dr. Au, the West Coast’s primary drug trafficker. But Cobb — under pressure of a failing practice and a disintegrating marriage — has himself taken up a long-abandoned heroin habit. With a racing plot and dramatic flip-flops, Deverell’s literary page-turner takes the reader into the seamy undergrowth of crooked cops, Asian drug lords, and a super-charged courtroom scene. Winner of the $50,000 Seal First Novel Prize in 1979, William Deverell’s Needles has gone on to sell 250,000 copies.

Lawyer and bluesman Monty Collins is used to defending murderers, and occasionally investigating murders himself. But he can't round up the usual suspects this time. The blood-drenched body of Reinhold Schellenberg, a world-renowned German theologian, has been found on the altar of an old church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, during Vespers on Saint Cecilia's day. The man has nearly been decapitated. The controversial priest, once a top insider in the Vatican, was known to provoke strong feelings in Catholics of all ideological stripes. Now those feelings have overflowed with horrifying results.

Arthur Beauchamp, the scholarly, self-doubting legend of the B.C. criminal bar, is enjoying his retirement on B.C.’s Garibaldi Island when he is dragged back to court to defend an old client. Nick “The Owl” Faloon, one of the world’s top jewel thieves, has been accused of raping and murdering a psychologist. Beauchamp has scarcely registered how unlikely it is that the rascally Faloon could commit a savage murder when his own personal life takes an abrupt turn.

When attorney Jane Barrett's lover collapses from a fatal dose of an antipsychotic drug, it falls to Barrett's oldest friend, Hallie Sanchez, and psychiatrist Mark Angelotti to defend her on murder charges. The pair succeeds, but at a dreadful price. As Mark gets closer to the truth, he realizes the killer is still on the loose.