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Showing 1 - 7 of 7 items
By Maureen Jennings. 2017
November 1917. The Great War is grinding on. Initially, Canadians are mostly eager to fight for the Empire, but the…
carnage is horrendous and with enforced conscription, the enthusiasm for war is dimming. William Murdoch is a widower, a senior detective who, thanks to the new temperance laws, spends his time tracking down bootleggers and tipplers. His wife, Amy, died giving birth to their second child, a girl who lived only a few hours more. Murdoch, racked by grief, withdrew from his four-year-old son Jack, which he deeply regrets. Now, Jack is twenty-one and has returned from France after being wounded. It is soon apparent that he is deeply troubled and bound by shared secrets to another soldier, Percy McKinnon. The night after Jack and McKinnon arrive home, a young man is found beaten to death in the impoverished area of Toronto known as the Ward. Soon after, Murdoch has to deal with a tragic suicide, also a young man. Two more attacks follow in quick succession. The only common denominator is that all of the men were exempted from conscription. Increasingly worried that Jack knows more than he is letting on, Murdoch must solve these crimes before more innocents lose their lives. Sequel to "A journeyman to grief". 2017.By Cory Doctorow. 2019
Four novellas are connected by social, technological, and economic visions of today-- and what America could be in the near,…
near future. It's a world in which "smart" kitchen appliances will only work with certain manufacturers' ingredients. In which a Superman-like figure attempts to rectify the corruption of police forces he previously assisted. In which a man vents his anger against insurance companies that won't fund his wife's experimental drugs. And in which, to survive the coming economic collapse, a man creates a desert retreat in which nothing could possible go wrong. Canada Reads 2020. 2019.By Martin Michaud. 2020
Tormented, rebellious police detective Victor Lessard races to track down a ruthless killer in Montreal. “Martin Michaud is a master…
at twisty storytelling and compelling atmosphere.” — Catherine McKenzie “Never Forget is a crackerjack read.” — Quill & Quire “A raucous crime thriller.” — Publishers Weekly When a homeless man jumps to his death in Old Montreal, the police discover two wallets in his possession: one belonging to a retired psychiatrist who was murdered in a bizarre ritual, the other to a powerful corporate lawyer who has vanished. As Montreal police detective Victor Lessard and his partner, Jacinthe Taillon, work to solve the separate mysteries, a dark conspiracy begins to emerge. While the pressure builds and the bodies accumulate, disturbing secrets come to light about a pivotal moment in political history. But will Lessard and Taillon crack the case in time to stop the killer from striking again?By Peter Robinson. 2020
Over two dozen of the very best mystery short stories from crime-fiction's maestro, Peter Robinson. Set in places as far-flung…
as Inspector Alan Banks's turf in Yorkshire, Robinson's own neighbourhood in Toronto, and in Los Angeles and Florida, these stories also reach back in time: to 1873 to an utopian milltown in northern England, Thomas Hardy country in 1939, and a small Yorkshire town during the Second World War. Complete with the award-winning stories "Innocence" (Crime Writers of Canada Best Short Story Award), "The Two Ladies of Rose Cottage" (Mystery Readers International's Macavity Award), "Murder in Utopia" (Robinson's fifth Arthur Ellis Award) and "Missing in Action" (Edgar Award), this collection is full of spellbinding plots, suspense that grips and won't let go, utterly unpredictable twists, psychological truths both sweet and scary, and characters you'd like to meet (and some you'd hope never to encounter).By Jael Richardson. 2021
A fierce and illuminating debut from FOLD founder Jael Richardson about a young woman who must find the courage to…
determine her own future and secure her freedomSet in an imagined world in which the most vulnerable are forced to buy their freedom by working off their debt to society, Gutter Child uncovers a nation divided into the privileged Mainland and the policed Gutter. In this world, Elimina Dubois is one of only 100 babies taken from the Gutter and raised in the land of opportunity as part of a social experiment led by the Mainland government. But when her Mainland mother dies, Elimina finds herself all alone, a teenager forced into an unfamiliar life of servitude, unsure of who she is and where she belongs. Elimina is sent to an academy with new rules and expectations where she befriends Gutter children who are making their own way through the Gutter System in whatever ways they know how. When Elimina’s life takes another unexpected turn, she will discover that what she needs more than anything may not be the freedom she longs for after all. Richardson’s Gutter Child reveals one young woman’s journey through a fractured world of heartbreaking disadvantages and shocking injustices. Elimina is a modern heroine in an altered but all too recognizable reality who must find the strength within herself to forge her future and defy a system that tries to shape her destiny.By John Elizabeth Stintzi. 2022
The brilliant new novel from the fiercely talented author of Vanishing Monuments, shortlisted for the Amazon Canada First Novel Award.…
On the morning of June 2, 2016, a jogger in Central Park notices a mass of stone in the centre of the reservoir, a mass that - three weeks later - will have grown into an active stratovolcano nearly two and a half miles tall. This inexplicable event seems to coincide with an escalation of strange phenomena happening around the world. For readers of Karen Tei Yamashita and Haruki Murakami and fans of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Olga Tokarczuk's Flights, My Volcano sets the mythic and absurd against the starkly realistic, attempting to portray what it feels like to live in a burning world stricken numb. My Volcano is a pre-apocalyptic vision following a global and diverse cast of characters, each experiencing private and collective eruptions: an eight-year-old boy in Mexico City finds himself 500 years in the past, where he lives through the fall of the Aztec Empire; a folktale scholar in Tokyo studies a story with indeterminate origins about a woman coming down a mountain to destroy villages and towns; a white trans writer living in Jersey City struggles to write a sci-fi novel about a thriving civilization on an impossible planet; a nurse with Doctors without Borders works with Syrian refugees in Greece as she tries to grapple with the trauma of surviving an American bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan; a nomadic herder in Mongolia is stung by a bee and finds himself transformed into a green, thorned, flowering creature that aims to cleanse the worldâ s most polluted places on its path toward assimilating every living thing on Earth into its consciousness. With audacious structure and poetic prose, My Volcano is an electrifying tapestry on fire.By Caroline Fernandez. 2022
A CCBC Best Books for Kids and Teens pick!Asha and Baz have a paper rocket to launch! Whoever builds the…
rocket that travels the farthest will get to meet astronaut Chris Hadfield. The only problem is Asha and Baz don’t know how to power their rocket. Stuck and unsure, the kids brainstorm by drawing a rocket in the sand using a stick. But this is a very unusual stick. In fact, it’s a magic stick! And it transports them back in time to meet a person who might be able to help them with their rocket problem: scientist Mary Sherman Morgan.