Poisoned Pen Press
Winner of the 2007 Agatha Award for Best First Novel
If a door suddenly swings wide in your memory, what would you see?
Young veterinarian Rachel Goddard's world begins to crumble when a client rushes into the animal hospital with a basset hound struck by a car during a thunderstorm. The dog owner's terrified tot, drenched with rain, loses sight of her mother in the flurry of activity and screams, "Mommy! I want Mommy!"
...2019 recipient of the Derrick Murdoch award from the Crime Writers of Canada
Fifteen years ago a young girl named Moonlight Smith went to her best friend Nicky Nowak's house for a sleepover. Moonlight joined the family for breakfast the following morning and was then picked up by her mother. Shortly after, Mr. Nowak went for a walk. He was never seen again.
Autumn has arrived on the mountains above Trafalgar, B.C. and Constable
...4) The Coaster
Bob Patterson considers himself an Everyman—albeit an Everyman with a rich, beautiful wife, two good kids, and a mail-it-in job that ignores his law degree. Despite his good fortune, Bob is idling through life, bored at work and at home. In short, he is the proverbial Coaster.
Bob's wife, Sarah, is the anointed heir to the empire built by her father, Sam—a kind of Kansas City, Missouri, Warren Buffet. Fine by Bob, the family soccer mom.
...2019 recipient of the Derrick Murdoch award from the Crime Writers of Canada
Trouble is brewing in the small, bucolic mountain town of Trafalgar, British Columbia. An American who came to Trafalgar as a Vietnam War draft dodger has left land and money to the town. But there's a catch. The money must be used to build a garden to honor draft dodgers. This bequest has torn the close-knit, peaceful town apart. Then the body of a leading
...When veterinarian Rachel Goddard and Deputy Sheriff Tom Bridger take teenagers on an outing to clean up roadside trash in rural Mason County, Virginia, they make a grisly discovery: the plastic-wrapped body of a young woman. One teen peers at the face through the plastic and screams. The dead girl is her sister, Shelley, a law student who has been missing for a month.
As Tom launches the investigation, Rachel copes with a visit from her own
...Summer is deadly in the mountain community of Mason County, Virginia. Deputy Sheriff Tom Bridger and veterinarian Rachel Goddard are caught in a maelstrom of lies that stretch far into the past and suspicions that threaten the future. Cam and Meredith Taylor are murdered within hours of one another, and Rachel is dragged into the case because she heard—but didn't see—Cam's murder. The Taylors arrived in Mason County as volunteers in the 1960s
...Iris Oakley, pregnant and still recovering from her husband's murder, wants only to carry on as a keeper at Finley Memorial Zoo in Vancouver, Washington. But she is confronted by a terrifying situation: alone and with no elephant expertise, she must rescue her boss, Kevin Wallace, from being mauled by a zoo elephant. Though she gets him to safety, he dies of his injuries. No one understands why reliable old Damrey attacked the foreman, and Iris
...10) Night Kill
Night Kill is a mystery set in fictional Finley Memorial Zoo in Vancouver, Washington, seen from an insider perspective on the challenging and dangerous world of zoo keeping. Iris Oakley, a young zookeeper, hopes to reconcile with her husband after he promises to quit drinking. But he's soon found dead drunk and just plain dead in the lion exhibit. A paralyzing mix of grief and anger at his betrayal keep Iris from questioning the assumptions
...12) Negative Image
2019 recipient of the Derrick Murdoch award from the Crime Writers of Canada
As the mountain town of Trafalgar, British Columbia, shakes off a long hard winter, famous photographer Rudolph Steiner arrives to do a feature on mountain tourism. Steiner is accompanied by his assistant and his sexy young wife, but he has another reason for the visit: to re-connect with the woman who left him 25 years ago to marry another man. That woman
...13) Muzzled
Making rounds to homes one wet spring morning, veterinarian Dr. Kate Turner visits an estate whose owners breed champion Cavalier King Charles spaniels. Instead of sharing traditional tea with the couple, she confronts a bloody scene of bodies and twenty-seven blue-ribbon dogs running wild.
Police initially suspect a murder-suicide, but when Dr. Kate proves the famous best-in-show champion is missing, a darker reality intrudes. She remembers
...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
...15) More Than Sorrow
Once, Hannah Manning was an internationally-renowned journalist and war correspondent. Today, she's a woman suffering from a traumatic brain injury. Unable to read, unable to concentrate, full of pain, lost and confused, haunted by her memories, Hannah goes to her sister's small-scale vegetable farm in Prince Edward County, Ontario to recover.
As summer settles on the farm, she finds comfort in the soft rolling hills and neat fields as well as
...Something frightening is happening in the mountain community of Mason County, Virginia. Pets are vanishing mysteriously and "Missing Dog" posters cover the waiting room walls at Dr. Rachel Goddard's veterinary clinic. A pack of feral canines roams at night, attacking livestock in a desperate search for food.
Then prominent physician Gordon Hall is found dead in his yard, his throat ripped open. Sheriff's Department investigator Tom Bridger
...17) Artifacts
Faye Longchamp has lost nearly everything except for her quick mind and a grim determination to hang onto her ancestral home, Joyeuse, a moldering plantation hidden along the Florida coast. No one knows how Faye's great-great-grandmother Cally, a newly freed slave barely out of her teens, came to own Joyeuse in the aftermath of the Civil War. No one knows how her descendants hung onto it through Reconstruction, world wars, the Depression, and Jim
...18) A Cold White Sun
2019 recipient of the Derrick Murdoch award from the Crime Writers of Canada
It's the end of March and Trafalgar, British Columbia, is preparing for the last influx of the seasonal skiers. Teachers, parents, and students are preparing to relax at home or head off on vacation. But for high school English teacher Cathy Lindsay, the week of relaxation doesn't work out as planned. She's gunned down by a sniper on a hiking trail, her small
...Anthropologist Dinah Pelerin had no idea when she left sunny Hawaii for Norway that she would get a crash course in the politics of genetic engineering and the Doomsday Seed Vault. Nor did she expect that she would become embroiled in the marital troubles of an American presidential candidate and his enigmatic, Norwegian-born wife...or that a dead body would tumble out of the hotel sauna into her arms.
In late December, Polar Night wraps
...2019 recipient of the Derrick Murdoch award from the Crime Writers of Canada
"Delaney glides between scenes with ease. She uses a bare-bones style, without literary flash, to achieve artistry as sturdy and restrained as a Shaker chair."—Publishers Weekly, STARRED review
Siblings Wendy and Jason Wyatt-Yarmouth and their friends have come to the peaceful mountain town of Trafalgar, B.C. to enjoy a two-week vacation
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