-
Found Drowned
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$22.95Based on a true unsolved crime from 1877, Laurie Glenn Norris’s debut novel tells the story of two small towns linked by the disappearance of a teenage girl. Mary Harney is a dreamy teenager in Cumberland County, Nova Scotia, whose ambitions are stifled by her tyrannical grandmother and alcoholic father. When Mary’s mother becomes ill, an already fragile domestic situation quickly begins to unravel until the September evening when the girl goes missing.
Across the water on Prince Edward Island we meet Gilbert Bell, whose son finds a body washed up on the beach below the family farm. As the community is visited first by the local coroner and then by investigators, Glenn Norris paints a fascinating and darkly comic picture of judicial and forensic procedures of the time. At once tightly plotted and pensive, the novel travels back to the circumstances that led to Mary’s disappearance and then back further to the circumstances of her parents’ marriage, all the while building toward a raucous courtroom finale.
-
Disposable Souls
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$24.95The body of Pastor Sandy Gardner, a TV preacher with a global following, turns up near a Halifax container pier. The mysterious case lands with Cam Neville, a city cop with a dead wife, PTSD, and a haunting past. Can Neville, a former biker and war hero, solve the killing and find himself?
In search of the truth, Neville and his partner, a Mi’kmaw Mountie named Blair Christmas, enter a perilous world of strippers, kiddie porn, and corruption that threatens to destroy them. Meanwhile, Neville is torn between loyalties to his two brothers, one still with the Satan’s Stallion bike club founded by their father, and another, a priest who wants to save everyone, including Cam.
In Disposable Souls, author Phonse Jessome has created a complex and compelling protagonist and placed him in a gritty underbelly of bikers, cops, and killers, masterfully blurring the lines between good and bad, sinners and saints.
-
The Fundy Vault A Rosalind Mystery
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing$19.95Linda Moore’s longÂawaited sequel to Foul Deeds is another highly engaging mix of art and environmental justice. Finally working a real job as a researcher for the Public Prosecution Service, Roz is on her first paid vacation. She has rented a cottage on Nova Scotia’s beautiful Minas Basin with plans to explore ideas for her next theatre production. Accompanied by her cat and a stack of Beckett plays, she has no sooner settled in than she spots what looks like a woman’s body tangled in the roots of a floating tree. Before the local RCMP can send a boat out, the body is retrieved by helicopter, and Roz watches it disappear over North Mountain. It’s time to call in her old sleuthing partner, McBride.
When McBride completely disappears, Roz and her longtime theatre friend Sophie roam the backroads and small towns of the Annapolis Valley in search of clues, narrowing in on the out-ofÂtheÂway quarry no one seems to want them to visit, the tanker trunks that nearly run them off the road, and a young journalist who seems to have come too close to the truth.
The Fundy Vault is a lightning-paced literary mystery that will keep the heart pumping and the brain ticking long after the final page.
-
Where Evil Dwells
Editor: Vernon OicklePublisher: MacIntyre Purcell Publishing Inc.$19.95From the macabre to the fantastical, from the paranormal to superstitions and folklore, from stories of ghosts, monsters and legends, Where Evil Dwells: The Nova Scotia Anthology of Horror has it all. These stories will take you on a wild ride to the extreme limits and beyond the realm of reality. Anyone who loves a good ghost story will want this book. It is a must-have for horror fans!
-
Cod Only Knows A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Finally! A new book in the popular Shores Mysteries series!
For the first time in thirty years, all the signs have returned to the waters off The Shores. Signs of a presumed gone, possibly legendary giant cod.
A photograph is the only evidence the big one ever existed. The Shores’s mysterious Abel Mack almost landed the most giant of the giant cod the last time they appeared.
At all costs, two powerful men with competing interests are after the biggest cod. They are closing in on The Shores–but the fisherman is missing.
Ninety-year-old Abel Mack has disappeared. At the best of times, Abel is there one minute, gone the next. His best friends and family are not sure they would recognize him if they found him.
Is he dead, by foul play or misadventure, or dead of exposure, as Mountie Jane Jamieson suspects? Or is he alive and sure to return, as his wife Gus Mack insists? Does the never-at-home Abel even exist outside Gus’s memory or imagination, Hy McAllister wonders? Or has he been kidnapped for what he knows about the codfish?
In this sixth Shores mystery by Hilary MacLeod, everyone is after the one that got away. But does anything–or anyone–who is attached to The Shores ever actually get away…alive? Cod only knows.
-
Dead Letter
Publisher: Acorn Press$19.95It is 2001 and the police constable’s girlfriend is murdered in a fit of jealous rage. When the constable realizes what he has done, he manages an elaborate cover-up. Only one person knows the truth.
Flash forward to 2012. Anne Brown is still running her late uncle, Bill Darby’s, detective agency after spending four or five years as his assistant. One day, the postman delivers an eleven year-old letter. The letter is addressed to her uncle from a woman named Carolyn Jollimore. She says she has evidence about a murder and begs for help from Darby. But Bill Darby is dead. And when Anne looks up the letter’s author, she finds that Jollimore too is now dead. Troubled with the evidence at hand, Anne must decide if she should investigate this eleven-year old murder.
-
Bodies and Sole A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95The Shores is celebrating a killer 200th anniversary. A skull tossed up on the beach sparks a heritage murder investigation.
Meanwhile, serial widow Vera Gloom moves into the village with her three ex- husbands. Are they one big happy family? Amateur sleuth, Hy McAllister has her doubts, and things get even more interesting when Vera starts working on husband number four. Hy has to convince Mountie Jane Jamieson that these people are more than just a little dysfunctional—before it’s too late.
-
Something Fishy A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Herrings are falling from the sky over The Shores – an unusual phenomenon anywhere, but especially so in this case. A newcomer, Anton Paradis, has set up a restaurant that specializes in dangerous dining, cooking up food that can kill to tantalize the palates of wealthy clients. It’s a recipe for death. Someone’s bound to get hurt.
Someone does. Oddly, the victim dies laughing. By accident or design?
Mountie Jane Jamieson suspects it’s no accident. But could there really be another murder at The Shores?
All the while, a wind turbine slices its blades over the cape, menacing the villagers with its eerie presence. Death is in the wind as well as on the dinner plate.
-
All is Clam A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95It’s Christmas at The Shores. There’s no snow yet, but there are so many outdoor lights that the tiny coastal village can be seen from space. Apart from Ian Simmons’ place, and he’s considered odd, there’s only one house in the village that isn’t lit up. It’s been dark for years. That’s about to change. Wild Rose Cottage is about to come to life, and death, once again. Meanwhile, the villagers wish for snow to complete the Christmas portrait. When it comes, it’s with the body of newcomer, Fitz Fitsimmons, a former acrobat turned bully and drunk. Mountie Jane Jamieson has seen murder here before, but none where she’d rather not catch the killer.
-
Mind Over Mussels A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95Nothing big ever happens in The Shores. Ceilidhs, yes. Killings, no.
That all changes when amateur sleuth, Hy McAllister trips over a body on the beach and tumbles head first into a murder case. Cottager Lance Lord, dressed like Jimi Hendrix, has had his head split open with an axe. As Hurricane Angus storms up the coast, Hy and Mountie Jane Jamieson vie against the elements to uncover the murderer in a village where almost everyone has something to hide.
-
Revenge of the Lobster Lover A Shores Mystery
Publisher: Acorn Press$22.95It’s lobster season at The Shores, a fishing village isolated from The Island in a storm surge. Parker, a collector of antiquities, has moved there with his partner Guillaume, a chef just out of rehab. “Hy” McAllister, a website writer looking for lobster recipes for a client’s newsletter, also needs a speaker for her Women’s Institute meeting. Enter Camilla, founder of the Lobster Liberation Legion, spouting crustacean right-to-life rhetoric. The legion starts freeing lobsters from their traps, angering the villagers and the man who runs Parker’s fisheries empire. In the tragic events that follow, the hidden connection between Parker, Guillaume and Camilla reveals itself.
