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A young Québécoise sneaks off to meet her Algonquin lover in an isolated hunting camp on the Migiskan Reserve. Five days later, Meg Harris discovers her frozen and brutalized body. The young Native is charged with her murder, and Meg feels responsible, since the young woman was a member of a crew which was helping her to clear some ski trails. Meanwhile both Meg and her friend, band chief Eric, are faced with another disaster. Someone is supplying the band’s children with drugs. Are the events connected?

After surviving the horrors of the Great War, Paul Shenstone works as a police detective in 1920s Toronto, rooting out petty criminals and rumrunners. The unusual murder of a prominent industrialist gives him the biggest case of his career and a not entirely welcome opportunity to make his name on the force. The waters are muddied when the investigation starts uncovering connections between the deceased Digby Watt and soldiers Shenstone knew in Flanders. What will Shenstone’s choice be if he has to arrest one of his own comrades?

In the fourth Polly Deacon mystery, pregnant and grumpy, Polly yearns to escape the increasingly annoying advice of family and friends. When an opportunity comes up to travel to England to attend a puppetry conference, she jumps at it, in spite of her "delicate condition". The trouble starts when someone tries to steal her luggage at the airport, and by the time she arrives in Canterbury, she knows someone’s stalking her. When another woman is found dead, a mangled puppet nearby, the question arises - is Polly next?

Another freezing winter descends in seeming peace upon the Northern Ontario lake where realtor Belle Palmer lives genteelly with her dog, tropical fishes and classic film collection. But the snow-laden tranquillity is tragically disturbed when a good friend is lost in a freak snowmobile accident on an isolated lake. Or so it seems. Belle and others suspect foul play, but a motive and a criminal prove hard to find. Resort owners, anti-environmentalists and the new local drug dealers may all have had reason to want Jim Burian quietly removed, and information isn’t forthcoming.

Northern Ontario realtor Belle Palmer is showing the lakefront mansion of a prominent businesswoman when she discovers the lady strangled in her bathtub. Could this third break-and-enter death reveal a serial killer at large in the Nickel Capital? The womans only child, a precocious twelve-year-old, comes to stay with Belles neighbours and wins her heart and theirs. Then after an argument, the boy disappears, riding off into the cold September night on his bicycle. Racing against time as fall temperatures plummet, Belle hooks up with a bumbling PI and joins the search.

Belle Palmers old high-school boyfriend rents a property on her road. Zoologist Gary Myers is studying the behaviour of elk in the wilderness., but soon he is found drowned. Did he fall and hit his head, or did a more sinister event occur? Meanwhile, someone has broken into his cottage, taking a camera and laptop. A clipping about poisoning on reserves leads Belle to visit the place of his demise. Seconds after she arrives, she is at gunpoint. She must paddle into the bush with no way back. Who has been causing havoc in the wilderness and will stop at nothing to cover their crimes?

As if it weren’t bad enough being a failed romance writer with no sex life, poor Fiona Silk has to cope with the spectacularly embarrassing demise of her old lover, the poet, Benedict Kelly. It’s exactly the sort of thing people notice in St. Aubaine, Quebec, a picturesque bilingual tourist town of two thousand. Now the police start getting nasty, the media vans stay parked on her lawn and the neighbours’ tongues keep wagging in both official languages. Worse, someone’s bumping off the other suspects. Can Fiona outwit a murderer in the mood for some serious mischief?

In the second Camilla MacPhee mystery, it’s now forty below in Canada’s capital, but victims’ advocate Camilla is feeling the heat. When a savage serial batterer goes on the rampage looking for revenge against his former girlfriend, the terrified woman turns to Camilla and Justice for Victims for help. But a sudden change of fortune causes her client to really feel the chill. Camilla wades into the investigation, now one of murder, and gets a frosty reception from the police.

Fourteen-year-old Jennifer Bannon cannot face another boring summer in Springhills. She convinces her mother to let her spend July at her grandmother’s cottage in Hawk’s Creek. She does not reveal that her plan is to live with her grandmother forever in order to avoid the problems back home. But Hawk’s Creek holds dark secrets, and Jennifer is soon drawn into the troubled world of Audrey Musquash, a Native girl accused of stealing and being out of control. In this tale of suspense and haunting friendship, Jennifer must face truths that will change her perspective on life forever.

Sport, fitness, games and murder are the main themes of this collection of wicked and witty crime fiction and poetry by the Ladies’ Killing Circle, who brought you Menopause is Murder and Cottage Country Killers. From the gym to the golf course to the supposedly peaceful practice of tai chi, murder, rage and revenge refuse to respect the human quest for immortality through fitness and can victimize the most tanned and toned bodies as easily as those of couch potatoes and gourmands. Excessive good health can lead to an early demise in this energetic new anthology.