National Network for Equitable Library Service

A chance discovery of a sepia photograph of her grandmother and her twin sister leads RCMP Constable Arabella Dryvynsydes on an investigation: how did a picture taken in 1914 in the mining town of Extension, BC end up at a garage sale in rural Saskatchewan almost one hundred years later? As Arabella sifts through long-forgotten letters and buried memories, she unearths heartbreaking truths of her family history and in the process also resolves a century-old murder.

Everyone at the Pleasant Inn is looking forward to a very merry Christmas. Oh, irascible proprietor Trevor Rudley has his usual complaints about Mrs. Blount's non-traditional floral arrangements. And he's sure he won't like housekeeper Tiffany's new beau, Dan Thornton, a writer, of all things. But it's Christmas. Surely nothing catastrophic could happen. Bad things do happen, of course. When the snow starts falling, it seems it will never stop. Margaret Rudley runs over a man lying in the road during a whiteout. Walter Sawchuck almost chokes when someone doctors his Mrs. Dash.

When art aficionado Leonard Anderson learns his wealthy patron, Luella Pryce, is to endow the local gallery on the Caribbean island of St. Napoli with her fabled art collection he is stunned. How could she? The Cartwrights, the most glorious of her paintings, had been practically promised to him! Desperate to keep them for himself, Leonard removes the Cartwrights from Luella's mansion for "cleaning," substituting clever forgeries in their stead. To erase evidence of fraud, he connives with his unscrupulous nephew to set fire to Luella's.

Montreal's Hochelaga district is in the grips of gentrification and its drug dealers and prostitutes are fast disappearing. Inspector Vanier, investigating the brutal death of a drug dealer, suspects the neighbourhood cleanup may involve murdering the unwanted. The local Police Commander is only concerned with declining crime rates and his improving career prospects, and is willing to go easy on a local militia group that is expanding its influence. When Vanier is suspended for brutality, he is on his own.

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.

HQ has ruled that Chief Inspector Aliette Nouvelle's failure to carry her gun directly contributed to the messy conclusion of a major murder case she'd led the previous summer. Her career now depends on a drastic about-face. Aliette has been ordered to come into the city to practice at the Beziers police shooting range and attend counselling sessions two nights a week with psychologist Gabrielle Gravel. For Aliette, this is not only humiliating, it's inconvenient. Beziers is a 40-kilometre drive from her home base in Saint-Brin, a sleepy wine town in the south of France.

When Stella Magnusson, beautiful, talented but devious, turns up dead at the Cullen Village dump in Manitoba's Interlake, Margo Wishart and her Book Club take notice. So does Corporal Roxanne Calloway of the RCMP. Soon they are in a race to discover the killer as the temperature dips to minus forty and it looks like someone else is going to freeze to death.

Despite their many differences, Detective Rachel Getty trusts her boss, Esa Khattak, implicitly. But she's still uneasy at Khattak's tight-lipped secrecy when he asks her to look into Christopher Drayton's death. Drayton's apparently accidental fall from a cliff doesn't seem to warrant a police investigation, particularly not from Rachel and Khattak's team, which handles minority-sensitive cases. But when she learns that Drayton may have been living under an assumed name, Rachel begins to understand why Khattak is tip-toeing around this case.

Claudia Lin is looking at a cliched post-college future as a chronically underemployed English major--much to the consternation of her mother, who wants her to settle down and start dating a nice Chinese boy already; her brother, who pushes her to follow in his model-minority footsteps; and her sister, who can't get over Claudia's privileged place in their mother's affections. But Claudia is used to keeping secrets from her family. Such as the fact that she prefers girls--and that she's embarking on an unsuitable but supremely fun career.

If you like Peter James, Mark Billingham and James Patterson, you won't be able to put down the compelling Inspector Hardy series. When Inspector James Hardy learns the body of a young woman discovered in the River Thames is that of a friend, his life goes into a tail-spin. The victim's flatmate is on the run for her life. She could be the key to catching the killer. In a race against time, Hardy must track her down before the killer does. As the truth behind the investigation unfolds, Hardy's own family come under threat.