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Long-listed for the 2009 ReLit Award Because business is slow for retired homicide detective Campbell Young’s new enterprise, A-1 Investigative Consultants, he decides to take a break a horse-playing vacation to Florida. No sooner are his plans made, however, than his old friend Priam Harvey approaches him with a complex problem: a young Caribbean jazz musician has been found dead in a Toronto hotel room, his body surrounded by the paraphernalia of voodoo.

In this, his fifth escapade, Inspector David Bliss goes undercover once again, and heads to St. Juan sur Mer on the Côtes d’Azur. His mission is so secret that even Bliss doesn’t know why he is there: he only knows that he is tracking down a man the force wants in custody for an unstated reason.But the winds of the Mediterranean provide clues that take Bliss off course and lead him to unravel two of the world’s best known unsolved mysteries: the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask and the location of the stolen Nazi gold.

Undercover operative Jack Taggart is hurled into a world where morality, justice, and the legal system are pitted against one another. Taggart investigates the murder of someone who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wiretap information identifies a shadowy gang member known only as “Cocktail” as being responsible. Taggart and his partner go undercover to join one of a coalition of gangs who are at war in British Columbia. Their mission is to identify Cocktail and gain evidence to convict him of murder.

Jason Conrad, a man with the wealth of Bill Gates, decides to preserve for posterity the seeds of as many animal and plant species as possible in a vast and remote underground facility, taking the world's legitimate seed banks and "frozen zoos" to a whole new level.

On the English Channel Island of Guernsey, Detective Inspector Ed Moretti and his new partner, Liz Falla, investigate vicious attacks on Epicure Films. The international production company is shooting a movie based on British bad-boy author Gilbert Ensor’s bestselling novel about an Italian aristocratic family at the end of the Second World War, using fortifications from the German occupation of Guernsey as locations, and the manor house belonging to the expatriate Vannonis.

Murder casts a long shadow, reaching from fabled Easter Island in the South Pacific to the desolate shores of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Detective Miranda Quin of the Toronto Police Service takes time off to write a mystery in the tropics and gets trapped in a sinister plot with global implications. Her partner in homicide, David Morgan, is left alone to resolve the case of a beautiful corpse on a Toronto Island yacht and ends up precariously compromised in the mysterious North. Their stories converge when they both return to Toronto.

The verdant lushness of Vancouver Island is not without its dangers… Summer on Vancouver Island gets off to a rocky start with the discovery of the body of a homeless man. RCMP Corporal Holly Martin notices drug paraphernalia nearby, and the autopsy reveals death from a combination of heroin and a synthetic opiate. Information leads Holly to believe that he had hidden something of value at the site of his death. As Holly struggles to connect the dots, a record drought heats up the vacation paradise, and one match could send Canadas Caribbean into flames.

Anger is simmering under the bucolic facade of Tanglewood vineyard… All Ben Taylor wants is to get away from the police force where he worked undercover for years. The RCMP has cleared his name in an Ottawa shooting, but that hasn’t cleared his conscience. He arrives anonymously at Tanglewood Farms in Southwestern Ontario, where he worked in his youthful summers. Back then, it was a simple family-run vineyard, but it is a far different place today. The farm has become the hub of a powerful family empire. When a body is discovered in a shack on the farm, Ben is drawn into the investigation.

Inspector Green explores a web of betrayal and deceit. In the dead of night, the phone rings in the missing persons unit of the Ottawa Police. A brutal blizzard is howling, and a wealthy social activist has not heard from his fiance in over twenty-four hours. Friends, family and police are mobilized to search the snowbound city. He comes to believe that his partner is fleeing for her life, possibly from his own family. When a frozen body is found in the snow, just blocks from the mans home, Green knows that someone is conspiring to keep the truth hidden.

After her mothers suicide, Maja Cleary turned her back on her family and Duved Cove, Minnesotauntil a desperate phone call reveals that her father has been murdered and her brother Jonas is the prime suspect. She flies home, knowing that she will have to confront shared memories of an abusive father. Even as she works to prove her brothers innocence, she cannot ignore the evidence that he had every reason to kill their father. The frigid, stormy Minnesota landscape sets the mood as she battles against time, the local police and the relentless snow.