The Quin and Morgan Mysteries

Toronto: early in the new millenium. After ten years working homicide together, detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan are a virtual couple who could not possibly live together, yet are incomplete being apart. They know each other intimately and don’t know each other at all. They share eccentricities that make them mavericks in the Police Service, yet have minds so different they form a perfect complement in dealing with the dark and elusive intricacies of murder.
He is a fallen Presbyterian from Cabbagetown before it was chic and she is a lapsed Anglican from Waterloo county who served three years in the RCMP. She is in her late thirties, with flashing hazel eyes; he’s in his early forties, with unkempt hair and a brooding smile. Both are complex, troubled, sometimes lonely, and always resilient.
Morgan and Miranda—he goes by his last name, she by her first—are real in a way that only fiction can be. They live in a real world that is by turns gothic, romantic, horrific, and comic; occasionally tragic, always enthralling. They occupy their narratives with a special flare, where his appetite for esoteric knowledge and her capacity for offbeat insight ensnare them in crimes that can often be resolved only at their own peril. They are worldy, witty, ironic, sometimes cynical, brilliant together, and often very funny. People you might like to spend time with, especially when murder’s involved.

Still Waters

A corpse with comb-over hair slowly turns in a garden pond in the wealthy heart of Toronto’s Rosedale, leading Detective David Morgan into speculations about ornamental fish, and his partner, Miranda Quin into a chilling sequence of revelations that could destroy her. The real mystery begins, not with the dead man but when a stunning woman walks onto the crime scene and without emotion declares herself to be the nondescript victim’s mistress. From that point on, everything changes. As Miranda and Morgan are drawn deeper into the complexities of their investigation, Miranda’s suppressed memories rise to haunt her and eventually take a shape that threatens her life. Dread, on her part, is countered on his by an increasing sense of foreboding. The resolution of crimes in the present exposes unresolved crimes of the past. The question remains: how does a relationship based on murder endure?

(Published in 2008)

Grave Doubts

The discovery of two headless corpses dressed in colonial clothing and locked in a grisly embrace draws Detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan of the Toronto Police Service into a strange mixture of sex and death that ultimately threatens their own survival.
The line between life and death is sometimes obscure...
Beginning with morbid curiosity, Miranda and Morgan get caught up in a story of inspired depravity. Through revelations in such diverse locations as a Toronto demolition site, a lonely farmhouse on Georgian Bay, the crypt of a derelict church, and inside the murky depths of a shipwreck, this strange account of love, lust and murder builds to a horrific crescendo. Seduced by their own personal demons as they pursue their case from the heart of old Toronto into the chilling waters off Tobermory, wit, whimsy and the strength of affection help the redoubtable detectives endure. The spellbinding suspense of this strange adventure will leave the reader, quite literally, breathless.

(Published in 2009)

I See England, I See France

I See England, I See France moves at a fast pace, allowing Morgan and Miranda’s complementary professional approaches, sexually constrained relationship, conflicting attitudes, maverick procedural methods, and mutual trust in dangerous situations to lead to resolution in a context of wit, suspense, and narrative complexity. This novel is set in equal parts in Toronto, New York, and London. It begins with murder and a wine fraud, escalates to explosive revelations of drug smuggling, and concludes with the Toronto detectives caught up in international terrorism.

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