Delicious intrigue awaits in Ottawa author Peggy Blair’s latest book, Shadow Play. Slava Kadun, an FSB agent and one Vladimir Putin’s hitmen, discovers a lucrative sideline–instead of killing Putin’s critics, he “disappears” them. With the help of a fourteen-year-old Ukrainian refugee, Nona, a computer whiz, he provides them with new identities and relocates them to other countries. But when Slava gets a call to arrange a hit on an Ottawa realtor, Susan Winchester, he worries Putin may be on to him. And when he arrives in Ottawa to find Susan Winchester is already dead in what looks like a professional hit, he knows he has to track down the killer before the killer finds him. The problem is the Ottawa Police are after the real killer too, and all the evidence points to Slava.
Detective Jamie Wallace is back at work after two weeks of forced vacation, her unofficial punishment for punching Michel Tremblay, another homicide detective, in the face. When she’s ordered to partner with Tremblay to investigate Susan Winchester’s murder, she knows it’s going to be tough. She and Tremblay hate each other, plus the mayor owns the unit where the woman was murdered and there’s an election underway… Order copies of Shadow Play at www.reboundpress.com.
For Chris Hadfield’s second thriller and next installment in his The Apollo Murders series, we move from space to another rich and exciting part of his CV: his time as a test pilot in both the US Air Force and US Navy, and as an RCAF fighter pilot intercepting armed Soviet bombers in North American airspace. The Defector is an exceptional Cold War thriller. As the Yom Kippur War flares into life, a state-of-the-art Soviet MiG fighter is racing at breakneck speed over the arid scrublands below … and promptly disappears. NASA flight controller and former top US test pilot Kaz Zemeckis watches the scene from the ground—and is quickly pulled into a dizzying, high-stakes game of spies, lies and a possible high-level defection that plays out across three continents. The prize is beyond value: the secrets of the Soviets’ mythical “Foxbat” MiG-25, the fastest, highest-flying fighter plane in the world and the key to Cold War air supremacy.
Rick Mercer is back with the sequel to his memoir, Talking to Canadians. THE ROAD YEARS: A Memoir Continued offers the inside story of his brilliant 15-season show, The Rick Mercer Report. While Rick’s biting political satire and rants were always entertaining, his travels from coast to coast to coast in search of everything that’s best about Canada, especially its people, warmed our hearts and made us laugh. Added to the mix were encounters with the country’s greats. Every living prime minister. Rock and roll royalty from Rush to Randy Bachman. Olympians and Paralympians. And Jann Arden, of course, who gets a chapter to herself.
Canadian actor R.H Thomson has graced the stage and screens for decades. However, it turns out he is also a history enthusiast. For the First World War Centenary, he built The World Remembers-Le Monde Se Souvient, an international commemoration exhibit now installed at the Canadian War Museum—theworldremembers.org.
His recently released By the Ghost Light, takes a look at his family’s history while providing a powerful examination of how we understand war and its aftermath. Using his family letters as a starting point, Thomson touches on areas of military history, art, literature and science to express the tragic human cost of war. As Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire so deftly says, Thomson reminds us that behind the numbers of dead we associate with war, there are brothers, fathers, daughters, grandmothers and each has a story.
