A Murmuration of Starlings

DCI Domenic Jejeune visits DCS Colleen Shepherd in Australia to discuss his future. Or so he tells his partner, Lindy Hey. But when a man’s body shows up at the exact spot he was abducted days earlier, Jejeune is drawn into a case of murder and revenge involving Lindy’s nemesis, Ray Hayes. Now he must decide between upholding the law and protecting Lindy from harm.

Back in Norfolk, an investigation into the murder of the CEO of a lithium battery manufacturer with Australian ties sets Sergeant Danny Maik on a collision course with Jejeune. Any evidence one detective uncovers seems to undercut the findings of the other. Set against a backdrop of Australia’s current environmental initiatives and echoes of its colonial past, these cases will challenge loyalties and long-held beliefs. No one doubts an Aboriginal Elder’s prophecy that the situation will end in tragedy. The only question is, will anyone manage to survive the fallout?

AuthorSteve Burrows

PublisherDundurn Press

Opposite Sully's Gym

A missing tenant, an irate mother-in-law, and a killer hiding in a Toronto rooming house — out-of-work PI Patrick Bird is back in business.

Patrick Bird thought he was helping his mother-in-law collect back rent from a deadbeat tenant at her Ossington Avenue rooming house, not starting a new investigation. But when he discovers Jack Turner’s third-floor darkroom is demolished and the photographer is missing, the other tenants come under scrutiny: Mr. Yusuf, the international student training to be a doctor; Danny Blinken, the shifty taxi driver; and Shirley Burton, the young nurse far from home.

As Bird investigates, he uncovers information about a fourth tenant who formerly lived at the rooming house. James Earl Ray, who assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. just weeks earlier, had been hiding out in a room on the second floor.

The case takes Bird and the police down a path of intrigue reaching right into the centre of one of the most infamous assassinations of the twentieth-century and leading our truculent PI to just about the toughest spot he could imagine.

AuthorAlexis Stefanovich-Thomson

PublisherDundurn Press

Seldom Seen Road

Seldom Seen Road is the first in the Burnt River series of murder mysteries featuring the Roth family detective trio: Mark, his daughter Stephanie, and his cousin Jeremy.

Of the three, Mark has the least solid claim on the art of solving murders, but he is driven by the insistent busybody nature of the recently retired. Profoundly hard-of-hearing after a career in musical performance, and equally disappointed with finding himself alone in his world after the death of his beloved wife, Mark stubbornly and clumsily puts himself in harm’s way to draw out the truth. Constable Jeremy Roth is the muscle of the group, patrolling the northern highways for the local police detachment and investigating on the ground. Mark’s beloved daughter, Stephanie, building her name as a criminologist at the university in Thunder Bay, gets to the details of the matter using her academic credentials and her innate puzzle-solving instincts.

When the body of local environmental activist Paul Robichaud washes up on the bank of a river in the small northern town of Burnt River, blunt-force wounds to his head suggesting murder, Mark is jarred out of his retirement reverie and drawn into the mystery. Who dumped Robichaud into the frigid spring run-off? Is there a connection between his death and both the largest uranium refinery in the world and the local small-time pot trade? How do Robichaud’s wife, Kim Keranen, daughter Algoma, local real estate developer Gillian Larch, and her pot-head son Bobby fit into the puzzle?

And who is The Albanian?

Mark ignores all official advice and his own precarious health as he digs deep into the secrets of his new town. But the town is looking back at him—observing, plotting—and it may prove more than a match for Mark’s loved ones, and deadly to him.

AuthorJohn Degen

PublisherLatitude 46 Publishing