Her Mother’s Daughter
$19.95From best-selling author Lesley Crewe comes a poignant and moving novel.
Sisters Bay and Tansy are complete opposites. Widowed mother Bay has never lived anywhere but Louisbourg; restless Tansy left the town as a teenager and stayed away for years.
And now, Tansy is home. Home, and unwittingly falling in love with her sister’s almost-boyfriend. Home, and befriending Ashley when all Bay can do is fight with her teenaged daughter. Home, and desperately hiding the real reason she fled all those years ago.
When crisis hits the family, the sisters draw closer. But the closer they are, the more explosive their relationship, and soon their troubled history threatens to shatter what’s left of their family forever.
Complex and heartwarming, Her Mother’s Daughter is an exploration of family and friends and the tangled skeins of love, mistakes, and secrets twisting between us all.
Hit & Mrs.
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Linda, Bette, Gemma, and Augusta are four lifelong friends who live in Montreal. This year they’re all going to turn fifty, so they decide to take a trip to New York together (courtesy of Linda’s philandering husband’s Visa Platinum). But at the LaGuardia airport washroom, Bette accidentally switches bags with a young mother who’s actually smuggling diamonds for the mob, and things start going terribly wrong. When they kill an aggressive cab driver with pepper spray, the four friends know this is not going to be the trip of shopping and Broadway shows they’d expected.
A series of miscommunications and mishaps entangles the friends even further into the criminal underworld of New York. But out of all the bad luck (Linda’s husband is staying at the same hotel as the friends, with his new girlfriend) and bad people (mobsters, drug addicts, and Linda’s husband) emerge four fifty-year-old avengers of truth and justice. In the style of Crewe’s Shoot Me, Hit and Mrs. is a wildly entertaining comedic romp.
Ava Comes Home
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95From the author of Relative Happiness and Shoot Me comes a riveting story about one terrible secret-a secret kept in shame, buried deep for self-preservation, and exposed in a moment that changes forever the lives of everyone involved.
Ava Harris is a famous actress living the life of the rich and fabulous in L.A. when a family crisis calls her home. It’s been ten years since she’s set foot in Glace Bay, Cape Breton- back when she was plain old Libby MacKinnon. Why she ran away, no one knows. Returning home, she must face her family, her friends, and her first love, Seamus O’Reilly, whose heart broke the day she left.
Ava is a good little actress, determined that no one will know what happened. She will keep the truth buried at all costs-even if she has to run again. But secrets have a way of surfacing, especially in a small town, and love has a way of blasting through the toughest barriers. While Ava can never go home again, perhaps Libby finally can.
Kiss the Joy as it Flies
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95With all the wisdom, humour, and joy we’ve come to expect from Sheree Fitch, Kiss the Joy As It Flies marks the well-loved author’s move from children’s literature to adult fiction. Set in the fictional Maritime town of Odell, with a cast of exasperating but lovable characters, Kiss the Joy As It Flies promises to be a remarkable debut and a reader’s favourite.Panic-stricken by the news that she needs exploratory surgery, forty-eight-year-old Mercy Beth Fanjoy drafts a monumental “to do” list and sets about putting her messy life in order. Among other things (hide the vibrator!), she’s determined to finally uncover the identity of her secret admirer; reconnect with a lost friend and rival Teen Gaudet; and, most importantly, get her hands on the note her father left her before committing suicide all those years ago.But tidying up the edges of her life means the past comes rushing back to haunt her and the present keeps throwing up more to do’s. Between fits of weeping and laughter, ranting and bliss, Mercy must contemplate the meaning of life in the face of her own death. In a week filled with the riot of an entire life, nothing turns out the way she’d expected.
Foul Deeds
$4.00A professional criminologist, Rosalind works with a cranky Private Investigator named McBride–a long-time association that has led her from one sordid foray to another in the world of crime. Her passionate escape is theatre and her latest venture is with an ad hoc company of out-of-work actors putting on a production of Hamlet. Ros finds her work on Shakespeare’s language to be a fabulous distraction until the uncanny parallels between life and art bring her face to face with murder.
Peter King, a respected environmental lawyer, dies suddenly- supposedly of heart failure- but his son Daniel, haunted by bad dreams, believes otherwise. Before McBride can get to the bottom of the case, Ros’s friend Sophie- the actress playing Ophelia- and her advisor Harvie Greenblatt, the prosecutor, are both drawn deep into danger. Ros and McBride discover that the case involves more than either of them bargained for: kidnapping, a city hall cover-up, a late-night chase and family secrets. Set in Halifax, Foul Deeds is an intriguing, fast-paced story with theatrical flare and plenty of humour. Linda Moore is the crime writer Maritime readers have been waiting for.
Relative Happiness (movie edition)
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$21.95Lexie Ivy loves her little house in Cape Breton, her big family, and the endless sea that surrounds her. She wouldn’t trade her life for anything, but at thirty she’s starting to feel like something’s missing.
Enter Adrian, a charming backpacker who takes a wrong turn at the U.S. border and ends up on Lexie’s doorstep, and Joss, an irresistible man who disappears just as quickly as he arrives. Lexie’s peaceful life has suddenly become more complicated than she ever imagined.
Lesley Crewe’s funny, whip-smart debut novel brims with Cape Breton-style humour. Filled with heartache without succumbing to it, Relative Happiness is the story of life and love in a small town, of four sisters who love, betray, and rescue each other in turn, and of Lexie Ivy’s joyful awakening. Released as a feature film in 2015.
Last Lullaby
$21.95Set in the fictional town of Paddy’s Arm, Newfoundland, Alice Walsh’s debut mystery novel is at once harrowing and homey, equal parts police procedural and diner gossip. When Claire and Bram’s only child dies suddenly, it at first appears to be a case of crib death. But when the real cause of death indicates homicide and Claire is arrested as the number-one suspect, her friend, lawyer Lauren LaVallee, promises she’ll do everything she can to prove Claire’s innocence.
As Lauren combs Paddy’s Arm for suspects, amid department politics and small-town talk, leads abound. Why are professors Frances and Annabelle being so secretive about their adopted daughter? What’s behind a troubled student’s sudden disappearance? And who is the mysterious platinum blonde observed at the scene of the crime? Meanwhile, Lauren’s own secret—a case that almost cost her her career back in Montreal—and the sudden return of an ex-lover who wants back in her life, threaten to overwhelm the investigation altogether.
Her Mother’s Daughter
$19.95From best-selling author Lesley Crewe comes a poignant and moving novel.
Sisters Bay and Tansy are complete opposites. Widowed mother Bay has never lived anywhere but Louisbourg; restless Tansy left the town as a teenager and stayed away for years.
And now, Tansy is home. Home, and unwittingly falling in love with her sister’s almost-boyfriend. Home, and befriending Ashley when all Bay can do is fight with her teenaged daughter. Home, and desperately hiding the real reason she fled all those years ago.
When crisis hits the family, the sisters draw closer. But the closer they are, the more explosive their relationship, and soon their troubled history threatens to shatter what’s left of their family forever.
Complex and heartwarming, Her Mother’s Daughter is an exploration of family and friends and the tangled skeins of love, mistakes, and secrets twisting between us all.
Case Against Owen Williams
$19.95Allan Donaldson’s first novel, Maclean, was shortlisted for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Donaldson’s new novel is a literary mystery set in the fictional town of Wakefield, New Brunswick, against the backdrop of the Second World War. Following a night at The Silver Dollar dance hall, a teenage girl turns up dead in a gravel pit. The last person reported to have seen her is Owen Williams, an introverted soldier stationed with the local garrison of “Zombies”—conscripted men unwilling to serve overseas. When Lieutenant Bernard Dorkin, a young lawyer from Saint John, volunteers to defend Williams, whom he believes is innocent, he finds himself up against a theatrical local favourite leading the prosecution and a public mostly hell-bent on a foregone conclusion. The Case Against Owen Williams explores the potential for wrongful conviction and the gaps in the justice system that allow it to flourish.
Foul Deeds
$4.00A professional criminologist, Rosalind works with a cranky Private Investigator named McBride–a long-time association that has led her from one sordid foray to another in the world of crime. Her passionate escape is theatre and her latest venture is with an ad hoc company of out-of-work actors putting on a production of Hamlet. Ros finds her work on Shakespeare’s language to be a fabulous distraction until the uncanny parallels between life and art bring her face to face with murder.
Peter King, a respected environmental lawyer, dies suddenly- supposedly of heart failure- but his son Daniel, haunted by bad dreams, believes otherwise. Before McBride can get to the bottom of the case, Ros’s friend Sophie- the actress playing Ophelia- and her advisor Harvie Greenblatt, the prosecutor, are both drawn deep into danger. Ros and McBride discover that the case involves more than either of them bargained for: kidnapping, a city hall cover-up, a late-night chase and family secrets. Set in Halifax, Foul Deeds is an intriguing, fast-paced story with theatrical flare and plenty of humour. Linda Moore is the crime writer Maritime readers have been waiting for.
