To Set the Stone Trembling
published by Vanguard Press
This is a dystopian novel about the terrifying genius of language to define the limits of human experience. It is both a compelling literary exploration and a challenging intellectual thriller. Book One, The Library of Enduring Dreams, opens in a recognizable Toronto with Anna Winston, a young widow desperately avoiding and pursuing her own identity, in flight from people who are determined to create a post-literate utopia through cyber-cerebral manipulation. Book Two, The Invisible Labyrinth, takes up the narrative two generations later, following Anna’s grandson in his attempts to endure in a regime where his poetic sensibility is a lethal curse. David Winston pursues love and coherence against a background story set fifty thousand year in the past, when human self-awareness through language began.
The Lindstrom Trilogy
Stonewood Imprint published by Iguana Books
Harry Lindstrom is a cosmopolitan private investigator who works out of Toronto and deals exclusively in murder. Harry is a paradox: a contemplative man of action, a brooding hedonist, a pragmatic moralist. Before the loss of his wife and children in a canoeing accident that he feels was his fault, he was a philosophy professor. The dramatic transition from exploring the fundamental questions of life in a lecture hall to exposing the mysteries arising from murder seems both absurd and grotesquely inevitable. A proud and solitary man of forty-three, Harry carries his wounds very privately, while his dead wife, Karen Malone, persists in his mind. She is his conscience and confidante, there for him when he is most on his own but a constant reminder of his guilt. He talks to her occasionally but he is not delusional, he knows she is gone. His web address, lindstromalone.com, resonates with the awareness that allows him to deal with inspired depravities that fall in his way, first in Sweden, then in Vienna , and finally on an axis linking the South Pacific to London and Greenwich in England.
Lindstrom Alone
The background story that led Harry Lindstrom from an academic career to become a private eye in Toronto is woven through his response to a woman’s insistence that her son is a killer. She claims his first murders were his own sisters. The dark machinations of a family bent on self-destruction draw Harry into their midst. With his deceased wife Karen as his closest ally but in treacherous association with a beautiful Swedish detective who stands six foot four, Harry’s increasingly compromised pursuit leads him to Stockholm in winter, then to a medieval town on the island of Gotland in the Baltic Sea, and finally to an ancient burial mound on Ingmar Bergman’s windswept island of Fårö.
Lindstrom’s Progress
Intrigued by the unlikely invitation from a woman in Vienna to prove she murdered her lover, Harry confronts a striking detective with flaming red hair called Madalena Strauss who appears to have stepped out of a painting by Gustav Klimt. The resemblance is appropriate as her great grandmother was one of the artist’s models and she herself owns a small pair of priceless Klimt’s recovered by her family after World War II. Her account is both sinister and redemptive as she induces Harry to help her. When she disappears, Harry leaves the city of shadows and goes back to Toronto, the Klimts in his possession. After disturbing complications, he returns to Austria with a vulnerable social worker and they travel from Vienna to Salzburg on a harrowing mission. Horrific stories from the personal and historic past come together in the depths of a salt mine near the ancient village of Hallstadtt.
Lindstrom Unbound
On the idyllic South Pacific island of Bora Bora, where he has retreated to savour and lament the lost past, Harry finds himself drawn into a strange relationship with a raven-haired B-list movie actress and her invalid husband, before murder ensues. Harry learns from the amiably monstrous Inspector Theophil Queequeg the unlikely couple were at the centre of a virulent religious movement. Back in Toronto, the woman reappears as a university professor with a disturbing capacity for making Harry wonder about the moral justifications for murder. This is the third novel in the Lindstrom trilogy but, like the others, stands on its own as Harry continues to struggle with the loss of his wife and their children.
The Silver Medallion Novellas
published by World Castle Publishing, Pensacola Florida
Surviving the End of the World
Angel Harris is on a quest to find a fellow human being after most animal forms on the planet have perished. Born without the use of her legs, she crawls through mud, over rocks, along pavement, then travels from Paris by wheelchair and skateboard, borrowed cars and a yacht, to the south coast of England, before setting sail in a small boat by herself across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. Her heroic account is told against the background story of herself as she describes the terrors, the mysteries, and the unexpected rewards of a plane crash in the northern Canadian bushland. Late for her own funeral, she becomes an anthropologist determined to survive the end of the world.
The Jewel in the Cave
The discovery of awesome cave drawings by a disabled young anthropologist connects her to the precarious life of the girl who made them, fifty thousand years in the past. Angel Harris was born without the use of her legs. Her work is to explore caverns and tunnels others can’t reach in the quest for fossilized human bones. Deep in the earth she encounters the primeval art of a young woman who calls herself MEme. Their two stories intersect. At fifteen, MEme emerged from her secret grotto to find her family had vanished. Horrified but undaunted, she sets off to rescue them from dreaded people we have come to know as Neanderthals. In the present, Angel is cast into subterranean darkness as she struggles to survive, only to realize that something in the world has gone terribly terribly wrong.
The Girl in a Coma
published by Poisoned Pencil Press, Scottsdale Arizona
Locked into what appears like a coma, Allison Briscoe dreams about some of the girls and women who precede her. She shares the dangerous adventures of Rebecca Haun who joins the Women’s Brigade with George Washington’s rag-tag army at Valley Forge. Then her dreams take her into the life of Lizzie Erb during the War of 1812 along the Niagara River. Finally, she enters the world of Mary Cameron, a Canadian rebel imprisoned by the British colonial powers in Upper Canada. In the present, Allie moves from a hospital into the Shady Nook Hospice and learns to communicate with Maddie O’Rourke. Together they are taken to a research laboratory in Boston where Maddie falls in love. And all the while, Allison solves murder mysteries, evades an ordinary man who might be the Devil, and struggles to live with her disabilities. She is tough and determined, she’s smart, she’s Allison Briscoe.
The Quin and Morgan Mysteries
Published in the Castle Street Mystery Series by Dundurn Press
Toronto: early in the new millennium. After ten years working homicide together, detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan are a virtual couple who could not possibly live together, yet are incomplete being apart. They know each other intimately and don’t know each other at all. They share eccentricities that make them mavericks in the Police Service, yet have minds so different they form a perfect complement in dealing with the dark and elusive intricacies of murder.
He is a fallen Presbyterian from Cabbagetown before it was chic and she is a lapsed Anglican from Waterloo county who served three years in the RCMP. She is in her late thirties, with flashing hazel eyes; he’s in his early forties, with unkempt hair and a brooding smile. Both are complex, troubled, sometimes lonely, and always resilient.
Morgan and Miranda—he goes by his last name, she by her first—are real in a way that only fiction can be. They live in a real world that is by turns gothic, romantic, horrific, and comic; occasionally tragic, always enthralling. They occupy their narratives with a special flare, where his appetite for esoteric knowledge and her capacity for offbeat insight ensnare them in crimes that can often be resolved only at their own peril. They are worldy, witty, ironic, sometimes cynical, brilliant together, and often very funny. People you might like to spend time with, especially when murder’s involved.
Still Waters
A corpse with comb-over hair slowly turns in a garden pond in the wealthy heart of Toronto’s Rosedale, leading Detective David Morgan into speculations about ornamental fish, and his partner, Miranda Quin into a chilling sequence of revelations that could destroy her. The real mystery begins, not with the dead man but when a stunning woman walks onto the crime scene and without emotion declares herself to be the nondescript victim’s mistress. From that point on, everything changes. As Miranda and Morgan are drawn deeper into the complexities of their investigation, Miranda’s suppressed memories rise to haunt her and eventually take a shape that threatens her life. Dread, on her part, is countered on his by an increasing sense of foreboding. The resolution of crimes in the present exposes unresolved crimes of the past. The question remains: how does a relationship based on murder endure?
Grave Doubts
The discovery of two headless corpses dressed in colonial clothing and locked in a grisly embrace draws Detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan of the Toronto Police Service into a strange mixture of sex and death that ultimately threatens their own survival.
The line between life and death is sometimes obscure…
Beginning with morbid curiosity, Miranda and Morgan get caught up in a story of inspired depravity. Through revelations in such diverse locations as a Toronto demolition site, a lonely farmhouse on Georgian Bay, the crypt of a derelict church, and inside the murky depths of a shipwreck, this strange account of love, lust and murder builds to a horrific crescendo. Seduced by their own personal demons as they pursue their case from the heart of old Toronto into the chilling waters off Tobermory, wit, whimsy and the strength of affection help the redoubtable detectives endure. The spellbinding suspense of this strange adventure will leave the reader, quite literally, breathless.
Reluctant Dead
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. They discover themselves trapped in a labyrinth of deadly complexity, and the only way out is together. Much more than their own survival depends on it. Islands, they learn, are an illusion. Everything connects, especially when murder is involved.
The Dead Scholar
When the corpse of an elderly professor turns up on Philosophers Walk in the heart of Toronto, his fellow members of the Francis Bacon Society are not surprised he was murdered. Each is profoundly in the dead man’s debt and each has reasons for wanting him dead. Detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan are drawn into their midst as the investigation moves from the university environs to a grand summer house in Muskoka, and reaches from the turn of the new millennium back into the bleakest events of the twentieth century, and even beyond, to the Elizabethan England of Bacon, a rogue and scholar, and the sordid beginnings of a new world order. The Dead Scholar is a drawing room thriller and a black comedy, an exquisitely paced intellectual puzzle and a complex study of quixotic characters whose lives intersect in a web of dark secrets they cannot escape. It is a world where Quin and Morgan find themselves quite at home.
Blood Wine
The summer before 9/11, Toronto homicide detective Miranda Quin wakes up in her own bed with her lover’s corpse beside her. The normally feisty Miranda is distraught and bewildered but slowly regains composure as she and her partner, Detective David Morgan, plunge into a rush of events that leads from one mysterious and violent death to another. With maverick procedural methods, quick and irreverent wit, and quirky affection for each other, they pursue a compelling narrative that includes a beautiful European wine expert who is not at all what she seems and a New York policeman who reads Thoreau. As the plot moves from Toronto through New York and London towards ominous resolution, exposure of a deadly wine fraud leads to explosive revelations of drug smuggling as an unexpected cover for international terrorism.