- literary (34)
- contemporary women (11)
- gay (11)
- police procedural (10)
- family life (8)
- historical (8)
- short stories (single author) (7)
- coming of age (4)
- native american (4)
- asian american (3)
- medical (3)
- occult & supernatural (3)
- post-confederation (1867-) (3)
- thrillers (3)
- urban life (3)
- 19th century (2)
- action & adventure (2)
- mining (2)
- political (2)
- sagas (2)
Grayling Cross
Why is magic still a secret in Edmonton? Good PR.
Psychic Anna Gareau and public relations expert Collie Kostyna keep things quiet for local magicians and for their biggest client, an underground supernatural society known as the Embassy.
In Grayling Cross, an investigator arrives in town on the trail of a missing teenage psychic, and hires Anna and …
The Bone Cage
Digger, an 85-kilo wrestler, and Sadie, a 26-year-old speed swimmer, stand on the verge of realizing every athlete’s dream – winning a gold medal at the Olympics. Both athletes are nearing the end of their careers, and are forced to confront the question: what happens to athletes when their bodies are too worn to compete? The blossoming relatio …
Murder in the Chilcotin
The third book in Roy Innes' mystery series sends RCMP Inspector Coswell and the newly promoted Sergeant Blakemore to the rugged district of West Cariboo in British Columbia, where a young Mountie constable has been found dead in his burnt-out cruiser at the bottom of a ravine. But what looks like an accident quickly reveals itself as a poorly disg …
Butterflies in Bucaramanga
Tanna Patterson-Z’s fictionalized account of the 1998 kidnapping of driller Edward Leonard by the leftist guerrilla forces of Colombia guides readers deep into the physical and political terrain of a beautiful but dangerous country that remains off-limits to the casual traveller. Butterflies in Bucaramanga is the story of a man who gets caught in …
Extensions
Long-listed for the Scotiabank Giller Prize!
A chance discovered of a sepia photograph of her grandmother and her twin sister leads RCMP Constable Arabella Dryvynsydes on an investigation: how did a picture taken in 1914 in the mining town of Extension, BC end up at a garage sale in rural Saskatchewan almost one hundred years later?
As Arabella sifts …
Drift Child
Emma Phillips is a 35-year-old divorcée with an undemanding job, a rustic old house, and a friend who provides all the benefits she needs. She’s comfortable, complacent, and accustomed to getting her own way—until she is shipwrecked during a violent storm in the Queen Charlotte Strait off Vancouver Island and is forced to assume temporary guar …
Crisp
Shortlisted for the 2010 Danuta Gleed Award for Short Fiction!
Crisp confronts the unspeakable parts of memory, meditating on characters caught in isolation and struggling to make sense of grief, disappointment, and the occasional dinner party gone wrong. Along the way, these characters don’t always make sound decisions: a grieving widow pursues a …
The Darkening Archipelago
Eight months after his own brush with death over Alberta’s Cardinal Divide, Cole Blackwater has learned that his good friend and former client Archie Ravenwing is presumed dead on the waters of British Columbia’s Broughton Archipelago. Days before his disappearance, Ravenwing was on the brink of unravelling a corporate conspiracy surrounding an …
Smoked
Detective Lane returns for a fourth time in Smoked, Garry Ryan's darkest mystery to date.
When Jennifer Towers is found dead in a graffiti-tagged dumpster, Detectives Lane and Harper must decipher the art to find its artist - and possibly the victim's killer. What begins as an unconventional murder investigation leads to the disturbing discovery of …
The Frog Lake Reader
Nonfiction author Myrna Kostash merges the past and the present in The Frog Lake Reader, which offers a multi-layered perspective on the tragic events surrounding the Frog Lake Massacre of 1885. By bringing together eyewitness accounts and journal excerpts, memoirs and contemporary fiction, and excerpts from interivews with historians, Kostash prov …
Seal Intestine Raincoat
After a severe winter storm and extended power failure, thousands become trapped in their homes during one of the coldest weeks of the year. For one small group of people, thrown together by catastrophe, a state of anxiety and claustrophobia follows as they discover no precautions have been made for a disaster of this magnitude. When the darkness a …
Ruins and Relics
These are short stories about people who harbour relics from their past: a postcard from Vienna, the cigarette burns that scar a boy's chest, a stolen USB pen, blue concentration camp numbers tattooed on a forearm, a man's sense of his own body as HIV overtakes him. Alice Zorn's remarkable debut collection displays these talismans of personal histo …
Incident at Willow Creek
After her mother's death, Liz Thomas inherits the key to a bank lockbox containing the official government documents of Camp 10, a prisoner-of-war camp located in the sleepy town of Willow Creek, AB during World War II. As Liz desperately attempts to piece together reports on a life she never knew her mother had, she discovers a family secret so tr …
The Cardinal Divide
Cole Blackwater’s life isn’t what it used to be. Once a political superstar within Ottawa’s environmental movement, he now runs a nearly defunct conservation strategy consulting firm that distinctly lacks a paying client. His ex-wife loathes him for a scandalous affair that ended their marriage, he feels he’s failing his eight-year-old daug …
A Hummingbird Dance
Detectives Lane and Harper are back for the third Detective Lane Mystery in this gripping twister of a novel that baffles with its ever-increasing body count and suspect list.
When Ryan Dudley ventures out on horseback and his horse returns without him, Lane and Harper are summoned to unravel the mystery. Dudley's disappearance marks the first anniv …
West End Murders
When a series of murders threatens the lives of an entire community in Vancouver, RCMP Corporal Paul Blakemore and Inspector Coswell team up once again to solve the case. What begins as an array of hate crimes suddenly culminates into a conspiracy against an American politician, and the lines between Canada and the United States become blurred as s …
Cleavage
Shortlisted for the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book!
Shortlisted for the 2009 Relit Award!
Cleavage tracks the patchwork musings of Leah, who, at twenty-four years old and two years into a relationship, discovers she has breast cancer. Told in fragments reminiscent of A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews, Cleavage details Le …
Weasel Tail
Peigan elders Joe and Josephine Crowshoe belonged to a generation still bright with the traditional knowledge and deep memories of their grandparents. They lived under a paternalistic government system that denied them their language, culture, and religion. They reclaimed their heritage and shared it with the larger community receiving honours for …
Wonderfull
When Emma Brodie, local prophet and mother of three, steals a boat and exiles herself to the middle of the bay for seven days and seven nights, she sets about a chain of strange events in the sleepy village of Garfax – a village no longer listed on any official government document. Radios begin to speak secrets, a rainstorm occurs that lasts for …
The Bottom Line
The Alberta government is looking to the private sector – and in particular to private health insurance – to solve health care problems. However, private health insurance is mired in myth and misunderstanding. The Bottom Line summarizes a huge body of evidence to get to the truth: private health insurance is more expensive and actually reduces …
Touch
Anna Gareau has a secret. Unwanted visions of strangers' lives haunt her when she touches certain objects. What she wants most is a normal life but Anna is far from normal. Travelling through Victoria, BC, Anna gets an unwelcome glimpse into a murderer's mind. She meets Colette Kostyna and senses Colette may be the next victim. Caught between her d …
Queen's Park
Detective Lane has a knack for discovering the whereabouts of missing persons. But the city's latest case has disappeared without a trace. After a brutal attack on his young nephew, ex-mayor Bob Swatsky has gone missing with 13 million dollars of taxpayer's money. Is he on the run with the cash, or is it something more sinister? A zany cast of char …
Diamond Grill
Winner of the 1997 Howard O’Hagan Short Fiction Award!
“In the Diamond, at the end of a long green vinyl aisle between two booths of chrome, Naugahyde, and Formica, are two large swinging wooden doors, each with a round hatch of face-sized window. Those kitchen doors can be kicked with such a slap they’re heard all the way up to the soda fount …
Fishing for Bacon
Winner of the 2010 Alberta Readers' Choice Award!
Winner of the George Bugnet Award for Fiction at the 2010 Alberta Literary Awards!
My name’s Bacon Sobelowski, and I’m trying to find my someone. Kenny Rogers sings a song that says there’s someone for everyone, and in Bellevue where I live, Kenny Rogers’ word is gold. It’s just too bad my …
Moon Honey
Carmen and Griffin, young and white, are goofy, head-over-heels in love. When Carmen turns into a black woman, Griffin thrills at a love turned exotic. But Carmen's transformation means trouble for Griffin's racist mother, already struggling with a new lover and a husband nicknamed God. The question is, can love be relied on to save the day? Moon H …
Icefields
On an expedition in the Canadian Rockies at the end of the nineteenth century, Dr Edward Byrne slips and falls almost 60 feet into a crevasse on the Arcturus Glacier. While trapped, hanging upside down and wary that the slightest movement could send him plunging deeper into the abyss, Byrne notices a mysterious winged figure embedded in the ice wal …