Spiderline – serie

The eighth novel in the Ava Lee series finds Ava caught in a labyrinth of high-level political corruption. Ava is in Shanghai for the launch of the PÖ clothing line. She has invited Xu, and over the course of the glitzy event and a late-night dinner, she detects a certain hesitancy in him. He later confides that the Tsai family, headed by Tsai Lian, the governor of Jiangsu Province and a “princeling” — he is the son of a general who was on the Long March with Mao and a member of China’s power elite — is trying to force him and his triad organization back into the drug business. Xu is already paying millions of dollars a year to various Tsai businesses, but the family wants more and thinks the new venture can deliver it. Xu believes this move would lead to his eventual destruction and feels he has nowhere to turn. If he opposes them, they will crush him. If he goes along with them, he thinks that inevitably the police and military will hunt him down.Ava sets out to help Xu deter the Tsai family. As she digs into the breadth and depth of the family’s wealth and corruption, she gets caught up in a huge tangled web, extending all the way to the U.S. and the U.K., where it reaches the top echelons of political power.

Brittle Paper 100 Notable African Books of 2024A Literary Review of Canada Best Book Cover of 2024THE FIRST NOVEL TO BE TRANSLATED FROM KAAPS, A SPOKEN DIALECT OF AFRIKAANS.When the unidentifiable remains of a body are discovered in a field in the Shadow Heights neighbourhood on the outskirts of Cape Town, Ley, the youngest detective at her precinct, is assigned the case. Soon after she begins her investigation, Ley receives a phone call saying that Carl, a friend struggling with a meth addiction, has gone missing after being linked to the local Drug King. Meanwhile, a church group believe they are cleansing the area by burning sinners, starting with gay people. The search for Carl, and the truth, winds through the vibrant lives of the residents of Shadow Heights. Violence, poverty, and shame plague the neighbourhood, but there is also love, acceptance, and hope to be found among friends and family in the shadows of everyday life.

A CBC Best Book of 2025A groundbreaking anthology of haunting stories by Black Canadian writersEdited by esteemed poet Terese Mason Pierre, this bold and innovative anthology of speculative short fiction reveals and uplifts the spectacular imaginings, reveries, reflections, experiments, and hopes of Black writers in Canada. A masseuse attends her mother’s fourth funeral, only to encounter family she’s never met. A postdoc instructor navigates an almost-life in an Elsewhere realm of safety and comfort. After societal collapse, an immigrant leaves her precarious station, and her memories, behind. A woman isolating from a new virus starts hallucinating. A young nanny accepts a job with a peculiar employer in search of immortality. A medium is tasked with summoning a spirit that hits too close to home. And two teenagers test a friendship over magic carpet flying practice.These ten breathtaking stories explore natural and urban landscapes, living and dead relationships, economic catastrophe, love, and desire—all while celebrating the persistent and ever-changing self, and envisioning beautiful Black futures.Featuring stories by:Trynne Delaneyfrancesca ekwuyasiWhitney FrenchAline-Mwezi NiyonsengaChimedum OhaegbuSuyi Davies OkungbowaChinelo OnwualuLue PalmerTerese Mason PierreZalika Reid-Benta

Two lovers plot a daring heist in this atmospheric noir about fate and fortune on the fringes of the American dream.Post-war Riverton has little to offer Richard, a mild-mannered loner working a dead-end job. When he meets Marlon, a smooth-talking confidence man, Richard finds his partner in crime, and together, they hatch a plan to rob the vault at Eddy & Dowd Safe Deposit Company—a once-in-a-lifetime score that will fund their escape to the Big City, where they can live and love as they desire.Their plans are complicated by a recent divorcée scheming her own route to wealth, a disgraced ex-cop, and a paranoid tycoon scrambling to hold onto his crumbling empire. As Richard and Marlon race toward their destiny, reckless violence threatens both their plans and their devotion to each other.Inspired by the iconic lexicon and unsparing storytelling of Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith, The Longest Death weaves a twisted morality tale about what it means to love someone at any cost.

Death is only the beginning.Zita Chang, Associate Marketing Manager at the Nine Circles, the only theme park devoted to dying, death, and the afterlife, is just another cog in a corporate machine. Determined not to let her grief over her father’s death interfere with work, she takes advantage of an employee perk: asking the Afterlife team to replace Siri with his voice so he can dispense the advice she never wanted while he was alive.But when the Executive Director dies under mysterious circumstances weeks before the company’s grand opening, Zita and her coworkers are tasked with programming his reanimated body to keep the launch on schedule. As more colleagues turn up dead, Zita must untangle the mystery in this strange, beautiful celebration of life and death, revolt and redemption.

The Last Stampede is a surreal and genre-bending Métis-themed literary horror story dealing with grief, kin, and reckoning in a dystopian near present.Four damaged souls are thrust together in the spectacular aspen country surrounding a prairie city: a dying old man haunted by a twenty-year-old tragedy; a revenge-obsessed horse woman with an enraged bronco that manifests life-sized from her arm; a corporate executive who will do anything, even kill, to protect his company identity; and a young woman with a mysterious illness who might die before finding her place in the world.The universe around these four characters crumbles when the global tech company the executive works for launches a horrific project to raze nature and replace it with data centres, leaving its customers as the only survivors. As birds fall dead from the sky and corporate workers topple trees and re-route rivers, the old man, the horse woman, the corporate executive, and the young woman discover the hidden connections between each other and confront their own troubled pasts and monstrous actions as they struggle for revenge, redemption, and survival.

From critically acclaimed author Russell Wangersky, comes a dark, psychological thriller about a man named Walt, a grocery store cleaner who collects the shopping lists people leave in the store and discard without thought. In his fifties, abandoned, he says, by his now-missing wife Mary, Walt is pursued by police detectives unsatisfied with the answers he’s given about her disappearance.Almost invisible to the people who pass him every day, the grocery lists he collects, written on everything from cancelled cheques to mortgage statements to office stationary, give him a personal hold over those who both ignore him and unwittingly disclose facets of their lives to him.When a new cold case squad is formed in St. John’s to look into Mary’s disappearance, the detectives begin to realize that Walt may be involved in more than just his wife’s disappearance.Set in modern-day Newfoundland, after reading Walt, you’ll be sure to never let your shopping list fall to the floor ever again.

In the tradition of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins, The Substitute is a deliciously creepy psychological thriller that will keep you guessing until the very last page.Warren Botts is a disillusioned Ph.D. taking a break from his lab to teach middle-school science. Gentle, soft-spoken, and introverted, Warren befriends thirteen-year-old Amanda, a lonely student looking for guidance.One morning, Warren returns from a jog to find Amanda dead, hanging from a tree in his backyard. A police investigation follows, but Warren is unable — or unwilling — to answer the questions that swirl around him. Suspicions mount, and Warren’s peaceful neighbours quickly become hostile.Meanwhile, an anonymous narrator who possesses a dangerous combination of extreme intelligence and emotional detachment offers insight into events past and present. As the tension builds, we gain an intimate understanding of the power of memories, secrets, and lies.