2019 recipient of the Derrick Murdoch award from the Crime Writers of Canada

What would it be like to return to your hometown after twenty-five years in prison for a crime you have maintained you did not commit? And why would you return?

Walter Desmond is back in Trafalgar, British Columbia, having been officially exonerated when new evidence showed corruption at worst, incompetence at best, by the Trafalgar City Police

...

"A professor in pandemic isolation rescues books from the flooded and collapsing McPherson Library. A man plants fireweed on the hillside of his depopulated Vancouver Island suburb. An aspiring luthier poaches the last ancient Sitka spruce to make a violin for a child prodigy." --publisher's website.

"Kiran flees her home in Punjab for a fresh start in Canada after a sexual assault leaves her pregnant. But overstaying her visa and living undocumented brings its own perils for both her and her daughter, Sahaara. Sahaara would do anything to protect her mother. When she learns the truth about Kiran’s past, she feels compelled to seek justice—even if it means challenging a powerful and dangerous man." --publisher's website

"Whether he’s chronicling fallen old-growth monarchs sprawled on a steep slope up-coast, the brassy orchestra of trumpeter swans, or the ecstasy of a smokejumper’s fall from the sky, Harold Macy contemplates the beauty of all that British Columbia has to offer with graceful lyricism and appreciation for the natural world. It is the human ties to the land that shine in Macy’s stories: everyday fishermen and loggers, gardeners and wildland firefighters,...

In the bucolic mountain town of Trafalgar, British Columbia, a young woman is found dead of a heroin overdose, her baby lying at her side. While this should be an open-and-shut drug case, restraint marks on the victim suggest to Probationary Constable Molly Smith and Sergeant John Winters that the death might not have been completely accidental.

On the day she was abducted, Annie O'Sullivan, a thirty-two year old realtor, had three goals—sell a house, forget about a recent argument with her mother, and be on time for dinner with her ever- patient boyfriend.
The open house is slow, but when her last visitor pulls up in a van as she's about to leave, Annie thinks it just might be her lucky day after all. Interwoven with the story of the year Annie spent as the captive of psychopath

...

"Lawless, British Columbia, a small interior town with a ski resort that has struggled financially for decades due to cliamte change reinvents itself as a gambling destination, and the Golden Nugget Casino and Resort is born. During on of the thickest fogs the area has yet seen, the Kootenay Glacier fault line is rocked by a major earthquake, exposing a massive new gold strike certain individuals will do anything to keep secret. Now, awakened from...

At thirty-three, Sara Gallagher is finally happy. Her antique furniture restoration business is taking off and she's engaged to a wonderful man. But there's one big question that still haunts her: who are her birth parents? Sara is finally ready to find out. Sara's birth mother rejects her, again. Then she discovers her biological father is an infamous killer who's been hunting women every summer for almost forty years. Sara tries to come to terms...

"Marina Salles’s life does not end the day she wakes up dead. Instead, in the course of a moment, she is transformed into the stuff of myth, the stuff of her grandmother’s old Filipino stories—an aswang, a creature of mystery and vengeance. She spent her time on earth on the margins; shot like a pinball through a childhood of loss, she was a veteran of Child Protective Services and a survivor, but always reacting, watching from a distance, understanding...