National Network for Equitable Library Service

Dr. Zol Szabo chose public health for its noble ideals and predictable hours. He never expected to be intimidated by the Prime Minister’s Office, roughed up by the RCMP, or threatened by the Hamilton mob.

In an affluent city perched on Ontario’s Niagara Escarpment, residents begin turning up on the pathologist’s autopsy table with what looks like epidemic mad cow disease. Zol Szabo, a public–health doctor and former chef, and Hamish Wakefield, a young infectious–diseases specialist, must trace the epidemic to its source while dodging the deadly prions that appear to have contaminated almost everything in the supermarket.

Detectives Price and McKeon are called to the scene — a husband and wife found slumped in their car, parked sideways on a busy downtown on-ramp, a bullet in each of their heads. That’s what’s in the papers, and that’s all the public sees. Toronto the Good, with occasional specks of random badness.

Does one honor one’s country or one’s heart? Malka Marom explores this classic dilemma in her stunningly powerful first novel, an extraordinary tale of people caught up in a violent and seemingly endless historical conflict, compelled by love and grief to transcend it.

“Refreshingly realistic … as good as having Sunday brunch with a girlfriend.” — Winnipeg Free Press

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?

A literary, genre-bending novel full of heart

Cult comic book creator Debbie Reynolds Biondi has been riding the success of her Cold War era–inspired superhero series, Sputnik Chick: Girl with No Past, for more than 25 years. But with the comic book losing fans and Debbie struggling to come up with new plotlines for her badass, mutant-killing heroine, she decides to finally tell Sputnik Chick’s origin story.

Ben is a performance artist about to enter his forties. His father and mother are both dead, and his brother, Jake, is a lousy source of information. So when he begins to struggle with a particularly nagging memory, he doesn't know where to turn. The memory: the assassination--by his mother--of a prominent neo-Nazi.

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.