May 22, 2026
New Fiction
The Anniversary by Alex Finlay – One fateful night in 1992, Jule’s and Quinn’s lives are changed and intertwined forever. Quinn Riley, a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, is arrested after he innocently tries to break up a fight but ends up nearly killing someone. Jules Delaney, high school royalty, survives an attack by the elusive and terrifying May Day Killer – a predator who strikes every May 1st in small Midwestern towns. A year later, Jules is struggling with trauma and guilt, tormented by the question: Why was I spared? Quinn is newly released from juvenile detention and returns home to fresh heartbreak: the unsolved murder of his mother. Over the next decade, their lives are revisited on a single day each year, May 1st. As secrets unravel and the paths of Quinn and Jules converge, two mysteries edge closer to the truth. All the while, the May Day Killer is still out there – and the clock is racing toward another anniversary.
Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth – Meet Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick: eighty-one years old, gloriously grumpy, fiercely independent, and never without a hot cup of tea – or a cutting remark. She minds her own business in her quiet Melbourne suburb, until a neighbor turns up dead and the whispers start flying. Because Elsie hasn’t always been Elsie. Once upon a headline, she was Mad Mabel Waller – Australia’s youngest convicted murderer. But was she really mad, or just misunderstood? Either way, she’s kept her secret buried for decades. Enter seven-year-old Persephone, a relentless little chatterbox who has just moved in across the road (armed with stickers, questions, and no sense of personal boundaries); Joan, who appears to have it in for Elsie; and a healthy dose of public interest – the cops are sniffing around, and the media is circling like seagulls at a picnic. So Mabel does what she’s always done best – she takes matters into her own hands. Is she a cantankerous old lady with a shady past? A cold-blooded killer with arthritis? Or just someone who’s finally ready to tell her side of the story?
All Rise for Murder by Roz Nay – Maude Kirby has recently been dumped by her unfaithful husband and is now back in her picturesque hometown of West Elk, British Columbia, living with her ever-optimistic, fashion-forward mother, Val. On the ropes financially, and with her confrontational fifteen-year-old daughter, Rhette, to look after, Maude applies for a job at the local courthouse, and to her surprise, gets it. How hard can clerking be? Pretty hard, as it turns out, and when an eighteen-year-old high school student is charged with murder, Maude finds she’s becoming emotionally invested. No one else seems concerned that the case rests on dubious “facts,” but Maude can’t help speaking up for the nearly silent boy. Things get more complicated when Maude runs into her first love, who appears to have aged very well – and who also might be dating Maude’s primes suspect!
Treat Them as Buffalo by Blair Palmer Yoxall – During a game of buffalo hunters, young Nikosis Eriksen’s cousin goes missing in broad daylight, leaving nothing but scuff marks in the muddy spring snow. It’s the first in a series of kidnappings of local Metis boys that sets the town of Lac-aux-Trois-Pistoles, Saskatchewan, on high alert. As the new detachment of North-West Mounted Police drag their feet, the women of the Eriksen-Desjarlais family – Niko’s Nimama, Auntie, and Chapan – take on the desperate search for Cousin. Gunslinger Kate McCannon and her band of women and children have been living in a camp outside town while the family men have joined Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont in the resistance. News of the victory at Duck Lake arrives in the camp as McCannon and the women join the search for the missing boys. When a boy is recovered alive but badly wounded, the need to find Cousin becomes all the more pressing. It isn’t until Niko discovers the truth about the man responsible for the kidnappings that he is forced to grapple with his own identity and resolves to bring Cousin back, no matter what.