The Blue Journal: A Detective Anthony Walker Novel


L.T. Graham - 2015
    When one of Randi Conway’s psychotherapy patients is found dead of a gunshot wound, the investigation is turned over to Detective Anthony Walker.Formerly a New York City cop, Walker now serves on the police force of an affluent community in Fairfield County, Connecticut.  He lives among the privileged gentry, where he understands that appearances are often far removed from reality.  This certainly proves to be true in the death of Elizabeth Knoebel, when Walker discovers that she had been keeping a private journal entitled “SEXUAL RITES”.  In her diary, Elizabeth was recording the explicit details of her sexual adventures with various men, many of whom were married to the women in her therapy group.  Elizabeth was a predator bent on seducing and, in some instances, humiliating these men, obsessed with a perverse mission that Walker believes led to her murder.As Walker uncovers the secrets of Elizabeth’s memoir, he becomes convinced that her killer is another of Randi Conway’s patients.  But which one?

The Car Bomb


T.V. LoCicero - 2013
    Booze, drugs, womanizing and a passion for the news are all part of what makes this brilliant, erratic TV anchor a major player in this deeply troubled city. Finally, Frank decides if digging out the truth about his pal the judge is worth risking his own career, family and life. “A compelling and wonderfully written piece of urban crime fiction, The Car Bomb is a pleasure from start to finish. With its economical and supple prose, brilliant dialogue, sharply-drawn characters and plot that keeps the pages turning, LoCicero has produced a gripping tale of corruption and redemption in Detroit. A classy and fast-paced read.”--Victoria Best, Tales from the Reading Room

The Measure of My Powers: A Memoir of Food, Misery and Paris


Jackie Kai Ellis - 2018
    But instead of feeling fulfilled, happy, and loved, each morning she'd wake up dreading the day ahead, searching for a way out. Depression clouded each moment, the feelings of inadequacy that had begun in childhood now consumed her, and her marriage was slowly transforming into one between two strangers: unfamiliar, childless, and empty. In this darkness, she could only find one source of light: the kitchen. Inspired by the great 20th century female food writer M.F.K. Fisher's works, it was the place Jackie escaped into herself, finding life, peace, comfort, and acceptance. This is the story of how, armed with nothing but a love of food and the words of M.F.K. Fisher, one woman begins a journey--from France to Italy, then the Congo and back again--to find herself. Along the way, she goes to pastry school in Paris, eats the most perfect apricots over the Tuscan hills, watches a family of gorillas grazing deep in the Congolese brush, has her heart broken one last time on a bridge in Lyon, and, ultimately, finds a path to joy. Told with insight and intimacy, and radiating with warmth and humour, The Measure of My Powers is an unforgettable experience of the senses.

The Rift


Rachel Lynch - 2021
    But will that mean justice?As a high-ranking woman in the Royal Military Police, Major Helen Scott gets the job done – no matter the task. So when she is pulled in to lead a NATO summit security team in Paris, it barely causes a ripple. Yet within hours she’s dispatched to Lyon on a new mission. One with a complex problem at its heart.Kahlil Dalmani and Fawaz bin Nabil were close in childhood, growing up in the hubbub of Algiers. As men, they are both wildly successful. Yet their paths to fortune have caused a rift. Fawaz’s empire is built on illegal trade, and when his estranged friend refuses to grant a favour he seeks to change Kahlil’s mind the best way he knows how: kidnapping his son, Hakim.Working out of the Interpol headquarters, Helen must unpick a web of deceit that spreads across borders and dates back years. Only by trusting those from her own painful past can she hope to return Hakim to his family. But with her focus on saving one life, she risks overlooking a plan that puts many others in grave danger.An explosive and gripping crime thriller from one of the most brilliant British crime fiction authors of recent years. For fans of Angela Marsons and Lee Child.

Girl Number One


Jane Holland - 2015
    The killer was never found. Now an adult, Eleanor discovers a woman's body in the same spot in the Cornish woods where her mother was strangled eighteen years before. But when the police get there, the body has disappeared. Is Eleanor’s disturbed mind playing tricks on her again, or has her mother’s killer resurfaced? And what does the number on the dead woman’s forehead signify?

Death in the Sunshine


Steph Broadribb - 2022
    Sure they’ll rest…when the killer is caught.After a long career as a police officer, Moira hopes a move to a luxury retirement community will mean she can finally leave the detective work to the youngsters and focus on a quieter life. But it turns out The Homestead is far from paradise. When she discovers the body of a young woman floating in one of the pools, surrounded by thousands of dollar bills, her crime-fighting instinct kicks back in and she joins up with fellow ex-cops—and new neighbours—Philip, Lizzie and Rick to investigate the murder.With the case officers dropping ball after ball, Moira and the gang take matters into their own hands, turning undercover homicide investigators. But the killer is desperate to destroy all the evidence and Moira, Philip, Lizzie and Rick soon find themselves getting in the way—of the murderer and the police.Just when they thought they could finally relax, they discover that someone has infiltrated their ‘safe’ community. Can they hunt down the murderer and get back to retiring in peace? And after all the excitement, will they want to?

The First Noël at the Villa des Violettes


Patricia Sands - 2018
    Everything was going so well in Kat and Philippe’s life together. Then suddenly it wasn’t. Roman ruins delayed the work on the Villa des Violettes. The Russian drug gang might be back in the neighbourhood. On top of that, Kat had worked herself into what Molly classified as a full blown “Christmas conundrum.” Kat wanted the holidays to work perfectly as she blended a Canadian Christmas with a Provençal Fête de Noêl for the first time in their new home. Now she’d lost her confidence and, with it, the holiday spirit. Philippe hoped a weekend trip to the famous Christmas markets of Strasbourg would solve everything. As it happened, things were about to get worse.

The Forgotten Girl


David Bell - 2014
    Now she’s clean and sober but in need of a desperate favor—she asks Jason and his wife to take care of her teenage daughter for forty-eight hours while she handles some business in town.But Hayden never returns.And her disappearance brings up more unresolved problems from Jason’s past, including the abrupt departure of his best friend on their high school graduation night twenty-seven years earlier. When a body is discovered in the woods, the mysteries of his sister’s life—and possible death—deepen. And one by one these events will shatter every expectation Jason has ever had about families, about the awful truths that bind them and the secrets that should be taken to the grave.

Penance


Dan O'Shea - 2013
    Colonel Tech Weaver dispatches a team from Langley to put the shooter and anyone else who gets in the way in a body bag before a half-century of national secrets are revealed. Detective John Lynch, the son of a murdered Chicago cop, finds himself cast into an underworld of political corruption and guilty secrets, as he tries to uncover the truth about what s really going on before another innocent citizen gets killed."

Murder in Death's Door County


Elizabeth Jackie Rose - 2012
    She is in a rut. She needs a change, and fast. Thrown a lifeline from her moonlighting job as a ghostwriter, she packs her suitcase and heads up to idyllic Door County. Asked to ghostwrite a book for an impossible client by an almost-impossible editor, Annie wonders if she is in over her head. She needs the ghostwriting job, but is starting to suspect that all is not what it seems.Then Annie's editor turns up dead, and her client goes missing. Amid the chaos, she makes fast friends with a bartender, Lizzy, and these two women sleuth to clear Annie's name. Suddenly, the whole story changes and Annie herself is in danger. To top it all off, a dark mysterious stranger, Donovan Archer, is trying to romance her. Is Donovan who he says he is, and can he help her find her missing client? Annie doesn't know who she can trust until it is almost too late...

From Here To Paris - Get laid off. Buy a barge in France. Take it to Paris


Cris Hammond - 2013
    Sitting in the sun, sipping a cappuccino, it occurred to me that sometimes your life falls apart just enough to allow you to put it back together in an entirely different way. So I did the most logical thing. I bought a barge in France. Then my wife and I set out to fulfill a lifetime dream of living in the shadow of Notre Dame on the Seine in Paris. From Here to Paris is the story of how we climbed out of our well-worn corporate trench and, together, set to work creating our dream life, alternating between our cozy Victorian art studio in Sausalito California and our 56 foot, 1925 Dutch barge, Phaedra, cruising the canals and rivers of France, inching toward our ultimate goal, the Seine and Paris. This is a story of facing up to the emotional and ego hooks so deeply embedded in the trappings and symbols that define “success.” Of selling the over sized house, shredding the credit cards and abandoning the mind-numbing commute in favor of a joyful struggle toward a fresh life. One lived in jeans and filled with long, leisurely afternoons floating along glass-still canals, through medieval villages and rolling vineyards in the heart of Burgundy. It’s also the story of realtors, moose horns, a mysterious black boat, catastrophic engine failures and how your life can pass before your eyes when you put those tons of iron into reverse and it keeps going forward. It’s about learning the proper gender of things in French, cheating at Trivial Pursuit, cajoling France’s sexiest boat mechanic and why real men don’t do yoga. It’s about realizing that getting to Paris can take years, so you better enjoy the journey.

Gargoyle


Ben English - 2011
    He was smart and strong and goofy, as boys are meant to be, but peculiar - he remembered everything. In the span of a single summer, she made him fearless. Now, even as Mercedes Adams is at the height of her career, forbidding changes loom over the world. That night, in the hushed calm of a spring evening, two plain-faced killers watch her home, waiting to make their approach. A few hundred miles away, a brilliant technologist returns to his childhood home in order to begin a descent into darkness . . . in London, a military game theorist finds himself pursuing kidnappers . . . outside Prague, a hacker and a thief stumble upon plans for a weapon unique to the world . . . an FBI agent faces an unpredictable fugitive in Chicago, while in Germany, a sniper-turned-schoolteacher finds reasons to take up his ancient calling . . . and a sitting United States Senator finds his life and his work invaded to terrifying conclusion. In Paris, a widowed man begins to recognize the hints and patterns of a greater puzzle that will bring them together . . . or kill them all. Mercedes Adams is about to find herself at the center of a vast, tightening knot of mystery, intrigue, and globe-spanning terror borne of her family's legacy. Rising to her aid is a small group of specially-trained men and women. And at their center? A man who remembers everything.

Scarlet And Gold


Randy Mixter - 2013
     Alliances are being formed. Treachery is in the wind. And danger hides in the shadows. Rachel Caine knew that marrying Morgan Reid, a soldier of fortune, would lead to a life of danger, but when a deserted pirate ship is discovered in the Great Eastern Sea, she is plunged into an adventure that will test her courage like no other. From battles at sea to a rescue on an island fortress, Rachel and Morgan face peril and betrayal by those whom they know and trust. In this game of deception and double-crosses, no man, or woman, is safe from harm, and only the strongest will survive.

Come Home


Patricia Gussin - 2017
    They are partners in a thriving plastic surgery practice, are very much in love, and they adore their young son, Alex. But cracks are beginning to appear in their fairy-tale life: lingering post-9/11 prejudice against Arab men, accumulating malpractice lawsuits for Ahmed, and most recently, pressure from Ahmed's wealthy family in Cairo for him to return to Egypt--permanently--with his son. The Masud family pressure becomes a demand as the Hosni Mubarak regime is seriously threatened by protestors in Egypt. Ahmed's family owes their control of the Egyptian cotton empire directly to Mubarak cronyism. If Mubarak goes down, the Masuds will surely lose their wealth, maybe even their lives. They need Ahmed back in Egypt to implement their plan to move their fortune and family out of Egypt and into South America. Ahmed must make a decision--stay with Nicole in America--or obey his father. And what about their son? Tragic consequences, that Ahmed could have never foreseen, propel both the Masud family and Nelson family on a path toward unspeakable tragedy.

Blizzard


H.W. "Buzz" Bernard - 2015
    C. Riggins, the epic storm is only one of the killers he’ll have to face as he undertakes a desperate journey.There’s also conflict behind the scenes at The Natural Environment Television Network (NE-TV) in Atlanta. Do they go public with a prediction of a historic snowstorm (social media is already atwitter)? Or do they follow a more conservative, meteorologically responsible route?