National Network for Equitable Library Service

A team of researchers from a nearby university have set up a research station in a fictional outport in Newfoundland, studying the strange emergence of phosphorescent tides. And Vivienne, a young assistant, accidentally captures a creature unknown to science: a kind of fish, both sentient and distinctly female. As the project supervisor and lead researcher attempt to exploit the discovery, the creature begins to waste away, and Vivian must endanger herself to save them both.

Detective Lane returns for a fourth time in Smoked, Garry Ryan's darkest mystery to date. When Jennifer Towers is found dead in a graffiti-tagged dumpster, Detectives Lane and Harper must decipher the art to find its artist - and possibly the victim's killer. What begins as an unconventional murder investigation leads to the disturbing discovery of two abused children, whose father becomes a prime suspect in the case. In true Detective Lane form, Lane must protect the damaged youths while keeping his own family in tact.

After a series of assassinations rocks Calgary's underworld, Detective Lane is conscripted along with his husband Arthur into working undercover to seek out links in the Mexico - Canada drug connection and stop the violence. As tensions mount back in Canada and outright war on the streets seems imminent, the laconic detective and his allies must use some unorthodox tactics to avert disaster in the Gulf of California and dismantle the cartel.

In this provocative collection of short stories, Karen Hofmann creates characters who struggle to connect or disconnect from entanglements and relationships.

Inspector Coswell hunts for a not-so-good doctor's on UBC's campus.

It's 1994 and Pete Curtis can't wait to get out of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Already, he's playing drums in a band whose songs belong on mix-tapes everywhere. Even though his new girlfriend seems underwhelmed, he knows it's just a matter of time before he and his pals break big. Ten years later, Pete is stuck teaching high school in the hometown he longed to escape, while his former best friend and bandmate is a bona fide rock star.

A fractured depiction of life after a death in a bifurcated Alberta/Saskatchewan community.

Broke City, the final book in Wendy McGrath's Santa Rosa trilogy, follows young Christine as she edges into self-awareness in the now-vanished Edmonton neighbourhood of Santa Rosa. Budding with creativity that her working-class parents do not understand, Christine questions her parents' fraught relationship, with alcoholism and implicit violence bubbling just under the surface of their marriage. Her insight turns beyond her family to her neighbourhood, nicknamed Packingland, a community built on meat-packing plants and abattoirs, on death.

Calgary's Detective Lane deals with complications on the homefront with the birth of his nephew Indiana, and a series of gruesome killings that shakes his partner to the core.

While working to restore an historic theatre in a seedy part of the city, a graduate student named Anthea searches to find her best friend, lost to the rhetoric of an itinerant street mystic. Almost a century earlier, Liam, a tenth-rate tenor, visits the same theatre while eking out a career on the dying Vaudeville circuits of the day.