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There is a killer at work in the sleepy village of Cedar Falls. The peaceful order of puppet-maker Polly Deacon’s back-to-nature rural life is violently interrupted when she finds her best friend Francy’s abusive husband lying dead in the dump with a hole in his chest. What’s worse, Francy can’t remember what happened the night of the murder. The cops soon get involved…and in more ways than one, as Polly finds herself falling for hunky officer Mark Becker.

It’s Labour Day, Camilla’s favourite weekend of the year. She’s planning to relax and ponder what’s happening in her relationship with policman Sgt. Ray Deveau. She’s emphatically not planning to get involved in anything that means trouble. No wonder the news that an old acquaintance has had an accident comes as a surprise. There must be some mistake. By the time Camilla unearths Laura’s connection to a violent revolutionary group active two decades earlier, she’s had several blows to the head and discovered that people shes been talking to keep ending up dead.

In the remote wilderness of West Quebec, where trees outnumber people a million to one and lakes a thousand to one, Death’s Golden Whisper opens with the sudden arrival of float planes bringing what Meg Harris believes are fishermen to the isolated northern lake she lives on. Within hours, she discovers that these men have come to develop a gold mine. She combines forces with Eric Odjik, chief of the neighbouring Migiskan reserve, to fight the mining company.

Winner of the 2004 ForeWord Book of the Year Award Toronto in 1856 is industrializing with little time for scruple or sentiment. When Reform politician William Sheridan dies suddenly and his daughter Theresa vanishes, only one man persists in asking questions. A former suitor of Theresa’s, bank cashier Isaac Harris has never managed to forget her, despite her marriage to another man. Thrust into the role of amateur detective, he must now struggle with the demands of his job and the shortcomings of the fledgling city police.

Being promotions director of a large shopping mall isn’t the most stress-free job on the planet, but Jenny Turnbull enjoys it and is darn good at it. But her job becomes quite a bit more gruesomely stressful when an unseen gunman goes on a spree in a bloody food court massacre during her special Hallowe’en promotion. And the situation gets totally out of hand when it turns out that the surviving victim, whose life is hanging by a thread in hospital, is the deadbeat son of a powerful, vindictive and grudge-carrying local city councillor.

Winston Patrick, a successful lawyer but dissatisfied with his career defending the downtrodden of Vancouver’s criminal world, trades in the courtroom for the high school classroom. Soon Winston’s past life meets his present when a student accuses a fellow colleague of a teacher-student love affair. Reluctantly, Winston agrees to provide legal defence, but the case takes an even uglier turn: the student is murdered, making her alleged lover the prime suspect. And this is no ordinary student.

Over eighty per cent of Canadians live near a body of waterand that means when Canadians turn to crime, somebody usually ends up all wet. In this anthology of original crime fiction, editors Violette Malan and Therese Greenwood celebrate that most Canadian of locations: the ocean, lake, or river near you. With tales set across Canada, by award-winning authors like James Powell, Rick Mofina and Barbara Fradkin, and even a crossover story from fantasy writer Tanya Huff, you may just find your next vacation spot… or maybe not.

Remembrance Day is a proud day for Camilla MacPhee’s good friend, Mrs. Violet Parnell, one of five thousand Canadian women to go overseas during World War II. But the next day she has vanished. Camilla, with only a few letters and documents to guide her, follows her friend to Tuscany, chasing though historic towns, across high promontories and along steep mountain roads. Vanishing old partisans and Allied aircraft crash sites keep Camilla hopping as she tries to find Mrs. P. before someone with a deadly serious reason to keep the past hidden finds her first.

The third Polly Deacon novel finds our heroine in the unlikely (and uncomfortable) job of designing a mascot (Kountry Kow) for a new mega-grocery store, despite vitriolic opposition by local merchants, including her aunt. This is nasty enough, but when allegations of municipal corruption arise concerning the sale of the property on which the store will stand, Polly’s sleuthing instincts take over, to the usual chagrin of her sometimes boyfriend, surly Detective Mark Becker.

The starter’s gun explodes, and Hollis Grant excitedly begins her very first marathon race, only to stumble almost immediately over a body lying in the road, the body of the Reverend Paul Robertson, her soon-to-be ex-husband. When the crush of runners passes and the medics arrive, it becomes clear that the Reverend has not collapsed from the rigours of the race, but has been brutally stabbed.