National Network for Equitable Library Service

“If you like your crime hard and fast, Kalteis is for you.” — The Globe and Mail

Set to the cranking beat and amphetamine buzz of Vancouver’s early punk scene, Zero Avenue follows Frankie Del Rey, a talented and rising punk star who runs just enough dope on the side to pay the bills and keep her band, Waves of Nausea, together. The trouble is she’s running it for Marty Sayles, a powerful drug dealer who controls the Eastside with a fist.

Stolen gems. Shady cops. Murders that could lead to an international incident. Orwell Brennan, chief of the Dockerty police force in small-town Ontario, had enough problems on his hands with the mayoral election, a daughter engaged, and, perhaps worst of all, someone in the department stealing his favourite cookies. Things are complicated for the loveable curmudgeon: a police officer from Toronto, in Dockerty as part of a Metro murder investigation, is killed in his hotel room.

When Eddie receives an early morning call for help, he catches the next plane to Britain. His friend, Dr. Peter Maurice, a renowned psychologist on a UK book tour with his wife Sylvia, has been accused of multiple, brutal murders and is about to be arrested.

Whether it’s a report from the real Cannes or a young couple discovering that reading Jacques Derrida aloud can lull their child to sleep, Jim Hanas finds the strange in the everyday and the everyday in the strange.

Hanas writes a lean and powerful line that makes even absurd situations—a man who cries professionally, a beauty queen leaving her slob boyfriend for an astronaut—seem painfully familiar.

Why They Cried answers its own question and the answer is funnier than you think.

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.

Captivating and heart–wrenching from start to finish

In the debut mystery featuring veteran Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Peter Cammon, what seems like a simple domestic crime turns out to be a series of murders ravaging a peaceful English coastal community.

A surreal journey of a man who is searching for purpose and for happiness Joe, a 36-year-old advertising copywriter for a slick New York agency, feels disillusioned with his life. He starts dreaming of a mysterious man, seeing him on the street, and hearing his voice. Joe decides to listen to the Man and so he waits on his stoop, day and night, for instructions. A local reporter takes notice, and soon Joe has become a story, a media sensation, the centre of a storm. When the Man tells Joe to 'go west,' he does, in search of meaning.

In these powerful stories the verandah people are Jonathan Bennett's own compatriots: Australians for whom the ever-present verandah is both stage and shelter, a retreat from hostile bushland or city street and a seductive barrier to participation in the wider world.

Suspense and corruption light up the third Dr. Zol Szabo offering