National Network for Equitable Library Service

2008 City of Victoria Butler Book Prize — Longlisted Jack’s life and career are on the line in a gritty return to the dark Vancouver underworld of Loose Ends. RCMP detective Jack Taggart has avenged the murders of his niece and nephew, but the consequences linger. His deal with Damien, leader of the "Satans Wrath" motorcycle gang, has put him in a bind and jeopardized an informant in the gang.

No wonder the university administration is worried: a fatal hit and run in the parking lot; a woman jogger drowned in the river. Accidents? Perhaps. But the latest campus death is no accident – and suicides don’t stab themselves several times and then cover themselves up with a raincoat. Despite warnings from her husband and the police, Rosalie Cairnes feels only she can untangle the threads that will lead to the motive and the murderer. And as she nears the truth, her own life is increasingly in danger.

Long-listed for the 2009 ReLit Award Because business is slow for retired homicide detective Campbell Young’s new enterprise, A-1 Investigative Consultants, he decides to take a break a horse-playing vacation to Florida. No sooner are his plans made, however, than his old friend Priam Harvey approaches him with a complex problem: a young Caribbean jazz musician has been found dead in a Toronto hotel room, his body surrounded by the paraphernalia of voodoo.

In this, his fifth escapade, Inspector David Bliss goes undercover once again, and heads to St. Juan sur Mer on the Côtes d’Azur. His mission is so secret that even Bliss doesn’t know why he is there: he only knows that he is tracking down a man the force wants in custody for an unstated reason.But the winds of the Mediterranean provide clues that take Bliss off course and lead him to unravel two of the world’s best known unsolved mysteries: the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask and the location of the stolen Nazi gold.

Undercover operative Jack Taggart is hurled into a world where morality, justice, and the legal system are pitted against one another. Taggart investigates the murder of someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wiretap information identifies a shadowy gang member known only as “Cocktail” as being responsible. Taggart and his partner go undercover to join one of a coalition of gangs who are at war in British Columbia. Their mission is to identify Cocktail and gain evidence to convict him of murder.

Jason Conrad, a man with the wealth of Bill Gates, decides to preserve for posterity the seeds of as many animal and plant species as possible in a vast and remote underground facility, taking the world's legitimate seed banks and "frozen zoos" to a whole new level.

On the English Channel Island of Guernsey, Detective Inspector Ed Moretti and his new partner, Liz Falla, investigate vicious attacks on Epicure Films. The international production company is shooting a movie based on British bad-boy author Gilbert Ensor’s bestselling novel about an Italian aristocratic family at the end of the Second World War, using fortifications from the German occupation of Guernsey as locations, and the manor house belonging to the expatriate Vannonis.

Murder casts a long shadow, reaching from fabled Easter Island in the South Pacific to the desolate shores of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Detective Miranda Quin of the Toronto Police Service takes time off to write a mystery in the tropics and gets trapped in a sinister plot with global implications. Her partner in homicide, David Morgan, is left alone to resolve the case of a beautiful corpse on a Toronto Island yacht and ends up precariously compromised in the mysterious North. Their stories converge when they both return to Toronto.

The verdant lushness of Vancouver Island is not without its dangers… Summer on Vancouver Island gets off to a rocky start with the discovery of the body of a homeless man. RCMP Corporal Holly Martin notices drug paraphernalia nearby, and the autopsy reveals death from a combination of heroin and a synthetic opiate. Information leads Holly to believe that he had hidden something of value at the site of his death. As Holly struggles to connect the dots, a record drought heats up the vacation paradise, and one match could send Canadas Caribbean into flames.

Anger is simmering under the bucolic facade of Tanglewood vineyard… All Ben Taylor wants is to get away from the police force where he worked undercover for years. The RCMP has cleared his name in an Ottawa shooting, but that hasn’t cleared his conscience. He arrives anonymously at Tanglewood Farms in Southwestern Ontario, where he worked in his youthful summers. Back then, it was a simple family-run vineyard, but it is a far different place today. The farm has become the hub of a powerful family empire. When a body is discovered in a shack on the farm, Ben is drawn into the investigation.