May 23, 2025

New Fiction

Death on the Island by Eliza Reid – When Kavita Banerjee, the deputy ambassador of Canada, dies suddenly at a dinner party attended by the great and the good from Icelandic business and politics, suspicion falls on everyone present – but particularly on the victim’s boss, Graeme Shearer, the Canadian ambassador.  Jane Shearer, Graeme’s long-suffering wife, is accustomed to cleaning up his messes.  But now, saving her husband’s career – and her crumbling marriage – requires her to investigate her fellow dinner guests. Uncovering corruption and murder is a dangerous job, but Jane knows better than most what desperate people will do to protect their secrets.

Detective Aunty by Uzma Jalaluddin – After her husband’s unexpected death almost twelve months earlier, Kausar Khan never thought she’d receive another phone call as heartbreaking – until her thirty something daughter, Sana, phones to say that she’s been arrested for killing the unpopular landlord of her clothing boutique.  Determined to help her child, Kausar heads to Toronto for the first time in nearly twenty years.  Returning to the Golden Crescent suburb where she raised her children and where her daughter still lives, Kausar finds that the thriving neighborhood she remembered has changed.  The murder of Sana’s landlord is only the latest in a wave of local crimes that have gone unsolved.  And the facts of the case are troubling: Sana found the man dead in her shop at a suspiciously early hour, with a dagger from her window-front display plunged into his chest.  And Kausar – a woman with a keen sense of observation and deep wisdom honed by her years – senses there’s more to the story than her daughter is telling.  With the help of some old friends and her savvy teenage granddaughter, Kausar digs into the investigation to uncover the truth.  Because who better to pry answers from unwilling suspects than a meddlesome aunty?  But even Kausar can’t predict the secrets, lies, and betrayals she finds along the way.

Marble Hall Murders by Anthony Horowitz – Editor Susan Ryeland has left her Greek island, her hotel and her Greek boyfriend, Andreas, in search of a new life back in England.  Freelancing for a London publisher, she’s given the last job she wants: working on an Atticus Pund continuation novel called Pünd’s Last Case.  Worse still, she knows the writer.  Eliot Crace is the troubled grandson of legendary children’s author Miriam Crace, who died twenty years ago.  Eliot is convinced she was murdered – by poison.  To her surprise, Susan enjoys reading the manuscript, which is set in the South of France and revolves around the mysterious death of Lady Margaret Chalfont, days before she was about to change her will.   But when it is revealed that Lady Margaret was also poisoned, alarm bells begin to ring.  The more Susan reads, the clearer it becomes that Eliot has deliberately concealed clues about his grandmother’s death inside the book.  Desperately, Susan tries to prevent Eliot from putting himself in harm’s way – but his behavior is becoming increasingly erratic.  Another murder follows…and suddenly Susan finds herself to be the number one suspect.  Once again, the real world and the fictional world have become dangerously entangled.  And is Susan doesn’t solve the mystery of Pünd’s Last Case, she could well be its next victim.

Fever Beach by Carl Hiaasen – Figgo, it turns out, is the only hate-monger ever to be kicked out of the Proud Boys for being too dumb and incompetent. On January 6, 2021 he thought he was defacing a statue of Ulysses S. Grant, but he wound up spreading feces all over a statue of James Zacharia George, a Civil War Confederate war leader.
Figgo's already messy life is about to get more complicated, thanks to two formidable adversaries. Viva Morales is a newly transplanted Floridian, a clever woman recently taken to the cleaners by her ex-husband, now working at the Mink Foundation, a supposedly philanthropic organization, and renting a room in Figgo’s apartment because there’s no place else she can afford. Twilly Spree has an anger management problem, especially when it comes to those who deface the environment, and way too many inherited millions of dollars. He's living alone a year after his dog died, two years after he sank a city councilman’s party barge, and three years after his divorce. Viva and Twilly are plunged into a mystery—involving dark money and darker motives—they are determined to solve, and become entangled in a world populated by some of the most outrageous characters: Claude and Electra Mink—billionaire philanthropists with way too much plastic surgery and a secret right-wing agenda—and Congressman Clure Boyette—who dreams of being Florida's (and maybe America’s) most important politician. The only things standing in his way are his love for hookers and young girls, and his total lack of intelligence. Noel Kristianson—a Scandinavian agnostic injured when Figgo thinks he’s a Jewish threat to humanity and runs him over with his car; Jonas Onus—Figgo’s partner in white power idiocy; and many, many more.