Escaping the pressures of big-city policing, Maxine Benson is happy to be appointed police chief in the resort town of Port Ainslie. Max's biggest challenge is to overcome skepticism at her ability to deal with major crimes, like the murder of Billy Ray Edwards. Few people mourn Billy Ray's passing. He was a bully and was also intent on derailing the biggest development project in the town's history. But murder's murder, and Max is ready to solve it on her own and prove her worth to the townspeople. And maybe even to herself.

Another summer, and The Pleasant Inn is filled to capacity. This season is especially exciting, as perennial guests Miss Miller and her long-time admirer Mr. Simpson have chosen to marry at the Inn. The guests and staff are clamouring to be involved, particularly Bonnie Lawrence, a young wife adrift while her husband is off fishing. Margaret and Trevor Rudley are delighted to host the wedding, and barring Mrs. Lawrence's obsessive interfering, everything is set to go off without a hitch. But when a neighbour is found dead in the woods behind the inn, the possibility of a joyous occasions starts looking distinctly less likely. Rudley barely tolerates the presence of the police, who are once again on site interviewing the guests as possible suspects. Detective Michel Brisbois is back, heading up the case, and even though she's prenuptially preoccupied, Miss Miller refuses to be left out from solving yet another murder at The Pleasant... much to her own peril.

An absorbing account of Monica Gall's education in London as a singer and as a human being, this novel is comic in the true sense, vivid and frequently moving.

An urgent first novel about breaching the prisons we live inside from one of Canada's most daring literary talents. An unnamed narrator abandons his unfinished thesis and returns to northern Alberta in search of what eludes him: the shape of the novel he yearns to write, an autobiography of his rural hometown, the answers to existential questions about family, love, and happiness. What ensues is a series of conversations, connections, and disconnections that reveals the texture of life in a town literature has left unexplored, where the friction between possibility and constraint provides an insistent background score. Whether he's meeting with an auntie distraught over the imprisonment of her grandson, engaging in rez gossip with his cousin at a pow wow, or lingering in bed with a married man after a hotel room hookup, the narrator makes space for those in his orbit to divulge their private joys and miseries, testing the theory that storytelling can make us feel less lonely. Populated by characters as alive and vast as the boreal forest, and culminating in a breathtaking crescendo, A Minor Chorus is a novel about how deeply entangled the sayable and unsayable can become - and about how ordinary life, when pressed, can produce hauntingly beautiful music.

Will Crosswell’s decision to pursue acting shattered his father’s dream of him being a useful adult. When we first meet the young Will he is a wolf in wolf’s clothing. But in the ensuing years, from relationships to the theatre, his life has become one shipwreck after another. Dumped by his fiancée and desperate to pay the rent, he finds himself taking a job on the bottom rung of the Great Chain of Being – a telemarketer. The satire becomes serious when Will hits rock bottom. After a life-altering AA encounter with an unconventional minister, Will enrolls in divinity school and has to survive his most challenging escapade yet - a forty day fast in a Newfoundland outport in the middle of the frozen winter. As he struggles to keep from freezing and starving to death, he is confronted by a series of strange events, not the least of which is an encounter with Billy Blight, a bigger-than-life Newfoundlander headed for perdition. Funny, surprising, outrageous, and moving, A Matter of Will is the tale of a middle-age maybe minister and his journey to find a mighty purpose.

Short-listed for the 2005 Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize Declan O'Malley came to the coast of British Columbia because it was as far away from Ireland as he could possibly go. Haunted by memories of his family's death at the hands of the Black and Tans, Declan is unable to escape his grief. He immerses himself in a new life, seeking to produce a more perfect translation of Homer's Odyssey while at the same time becoming closer to the family on whose property he is living. But Declan cannot free himself from his past, and when Ireland beckons, he is drawn to his own history and to the opportunity for a happier future.

Thirteen-year-old Rabia, along with her mother and younger brother, flee Afghanistan and the brutal Taliban for Pakistan. Relocating to North America, their flight falls on the fateful morning of 9/11. After the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, their plane is diverted to Gander, Newfoundland. Also on the plane is an American boy named Colin, who struggles with his prejudices against Rabia and her family. The people in the small community of Gander, including teens Jason and Leah, open their hearts and their homes to the stranded passengers, volunteering to billet the hundreds of unexpected visitors to the island. Their kindness might be the bridge to understanding and acceptance that Colin and Rabia need.

A Lethal Lesson(#8). Back home in the Kootenays after her Arizona honeymoon, Lane offers her assistance when neither the outgoing teacher, Rose, nor her replacement, Wendy, show up at the local schoolhouse one blizzardy Monday in December. But when she finds the teachers' cottage ransacked with Rose unconscious and bleeding, and Wendy missing, Lane delivers Rose to the hospital in Nelson and turns the case over to her exasperated husband, Inspector Darling, and his capable colleagues, Sergeant Ames and Constable Terrell. Never one to leave a post unmanned, Lane enlists as substitute teacher for the final two weeks before the Christmas holidays, during which time she discovers a threatening note in the teachers' desk and a revolver in the supply cupboard. But these clues only convolute the case further. Who has been tormenting these women, and where has Wendy gone? Meanwhile, Darling finds the body of a hit-and-run victim in a snowbank miles outside of Nelson, the residents of King's Cove are preoccupied by the possibility of a new neighbour, and Sergeant Ames is as confused as ever by the inimitable Tina Van Eyck.

Janey knows she should be trying to put her academic career on the map, but how? She'll more readily poke fun at than engage in yet another overly dry and theoretical conference. And her husband and their friends simply encourage her off the serious academic path, providing anarchic ideas from Foucault-in-snowsuits to erotic poetry addressed to the harmonium collecting dust in the music department.

A Large Harmonium is a sharply comical year-in-the-gloriously-unruly- life story. We follow Janey as she negotiates motherhood ("Little Max is a Roald Dahl story, I decide"); career ("the whole enterprise starts to resemble a lion-taming act without the lions"); frightful in-laws ("At breakfast, the two of them are serene and fit-looking.

I never can see how people look like that in the morning"); and which literary hero her husband Hector most resembles ("Rochester! Why should I be Rochester? He's a bastard. And he has to be blinded and lose an arm or something before he can be tamed.") Along the way, she relies on Hector, boy-wonder babysitter Rene, and even crazy unreliable friend Jam. And on Jake, the understanding minister who helps her pick her way through it all.