Keno is twenty-three, a high-school dropout working as a rent collector for a slum landlord.Apart from hitting on the office secretary, Cass, Keno's life is bleak. His job takes him into sad, mean places where kids wail, drunks fight and women get beaten up. He works his territory with Jaco, who’s tougher and shiftier than any of the folks they’re sent to shake rent out of. One night Keno and Jaco finally catch up to one of their targets. But she’ll never pay. She’...

A reclusive English botanist helps a woman search for the truth about her missing orchid enthusiast sister in southwestern France in this “moody and elegant suspense story” (The Washington Post Book World).Nearly twenty years have passed since Mara Dunn’s sister Bedie, an orchid enthusiast, disappeared while on a hiking holiday in southwestern France. Mara remains determined to find out what happened—but her only real clue is a sequence of wild orchids, in...

Gina Lopez is twenty-six, a postal worker during the week, a mud wrestler on weekends. She's also a recent widow, though she is not exactly mourning the death of her abusive husband Chico. Instead, she's anxiously awaiting the life-insurance settlement that will pay off his gambling debts. After that she's hoping to take her mud-wrestling skills out of small-town-Ontario bars and down to the more lucrative US circuit. And then Marcia Beekland enters her life. Marcia has video evidence that...

Interior decorator Mara Dunn and orchidologist Julian Wood team up again to solve two murders in Michelle Wan’s charming new botanical mystery.Mara is renovating the manor house of the wealthy Christophe de Bonfond when she discovers the body of a murdered infant. The body, concealed for more than a century, brings to light unexpected and critical information on an elusive Lady's Slipper orchid that Julian avidly seeks. Christophe hires genealogist Jean-Claude Fournier to exonerate his anc...

"Cross-pollinates Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief with Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence."—The Washington Post Book World on Deadly SlipperWinter in the Dordogne: delicious food, ruggedly beautiful scenery, unscrupulous orchid hunters, illegal drugs, a poetic house-breaker, and three mysterious deaths and counting . . .In this electrifying third installment of the highly acclaimed Death in the Dordogne series, expat Montre...

Nicole Patterson is a young, green and very eager probationary constable with the Ontario Provincial Police. Although she spends much of her time breaking up bar fights, giving out traffic tickets and finding lost kids, she dreams of one day becoming a detective. Late one bitterly cold winter night, she comes across the body of a young woman lying on the edge of a snow-covered field on the outskirts of town. The girl appears to have been strangled. Nicole recognizes the victim as a local h...

For his Valentine's night call-in show, host Charlie D plans to offer his listeners two hours on the topic of "satisfaction." His in-studio guest is twenty-five-year-old Misty de Vol Burgh, formerly the highest-paid escort in the city but now happily married to eighty-three-year-old billionaire Henry Burgh. It's all good fun until Charlie receives a chilling message: "It's take-out-the-garbage night. Time to kill all the hookers and wash the streets with blood." When Charlie is directed to...

When softhearted handyman Cedric O'Toole agrees to help Barry Mitchell renovate his farmhouse, he finds himself facing old fears. Not only did Mitchell bully Cedric all through school, but his life has been troubled ever since. Now, just out of prison, he's broke and his parents have gone missing, leaving a cloud of suspicion hanging over his head. But when Barry warns him not to touch the boarded-up door in the cellar, the ever-curious Cedric can't resist. The small storage room, obviousl...

It's Father's Day weekend-a tough time for Charlie D, host of a late-night radio call-in show that offers supportive advice to troubled listeners. For years Charlie has been alienated from his father-a retired politician who was always too busy for his son when Charlie was growing up. The trouble is, his dad has chosen this weekend to attempt to reconcile with his son. Charlie is not keen to forgive. But Charlie's personal issues suddenly seem mundane when an email arrives from a young lis...

In a thick fog, a ferry docks on Glenphiddie Island and disgorges Singer Brown's decrepit van. The homeless singer is there to exact revenge on the man who destroyed her life but someone has already killed Johnny Vibes. And now the murderer is coming after Singer.Each of the former members of the band, Vortex, are hiding sins both old and new, secrets worth killing for, but Singer has one ally. Or does she? Johnny Vibes' wife has as much to lose as Singer if she doesn't agree to gi...

It's a day like any other for Deuce Winters, a stay-at-home dad in sleepy Rose Petal, Texas, where he and his three-year-old daughter Carly are making their weekly trip to the grocery store. But the discovery of a dead body in his mini-van quickly throws his quiet life into disarray. In a town where gossip spreads faster than a brush fire in July, it doesn't help that the victim ruined Deuce's high school football career and married his ex-girlfriend. . .As the number one suspect i...

Charlie D is back doing his late-night radio call-in show. It's Halloween -- The Day of the Dead. Not a day filled with good memories for Charlie, but the show must go on. His studio guest this evening is Dr. Robin Harris, an arrogant and ambitious "expert in the arts of dying and grieving," who also seems to be auditioning for her own radio talk show. Charlie and Dr. Harris do not hit it off. Things go from bad to worse when the doctor's ex-lover, Gabe, goes on air to announce that he's a...