Phyllis Brett Young

Artist Julia Warner left life in the big city to avoid reminders of her little sister’s disappearance. Now teaching in a smalltown public school, memories of that tragedy flood back when one of her young students, Deborah Hurst, is assaulted. Not six months later, a second student is assaulted and killed—but this time, Julia gets a fleeting look at the perpetrator. Greg Malcolm, the doctor treating Deborah, wants to work with Julia in brining the murderer to justice, but the art teacher has plans of her own. First published in 1962 under the pseudonym “Kendal Young,” The Ravine was the author’s only thriller. It was adapted for the screen and released as Assault (1971), starring Suzy Kendall. This new edition is the first in 48 years.

William Vallières

From Montreal's metro stations and streets to pastoral mise-en-scènes, William Vallières' first book, Versus, is a lyric bildungsroman filled with portraits of seduction and infatuation, loneliness and buried shame. "What yesterday had fought to bud / Is stunted under ice today." These are darkly canny poems about childhood, familial histories, lost love and the weariness of spending one's "being being / Everything I'm against." Deftly crafted, intense and compact, with barbed insights arrived at through verbal twists and syntactic half-turns, Vallières' voice is entirely his own.

Kenneth Orvis

‘God help us, Dent – the thing is, my daughter has become a dope fiend.’

Maxwell Dent studied law at McGill and served in the RCAF and Intelligence M-5 during the Korean War. For a private investigator, he’s as respectable as they come. No wonder then that it’s Dent Huntley Ashton summons to his Westmount mansion. A respected captain of industry, the wealthy man knows the PI can be relied upon to be discreet.

Ashton’s daughter Helen has fallen into heroin addiction, and the millionaire wants Dent to smash the ring supplying her vice, just as he took down a ring operating in Korea.

Set in 1954, the novel captures the dying days of Montreal’s reputation as one of the world’s great sin cities. The Damned and the Destroyed was published in 1962 by McClelland & Stewart in Canada and Dennis Dobson in the UK; this Ricochet Books edition marks the first print edition in more than five decades.

Sheila Kindellan-Sheehan

The nightmare began on a warm summer night. A six-year-old boy was found in a park shack, bludgeoned to death in the quiet residential district of Montreal's Notre-Dame-de-Grâce. Soon after, an eight-year-old boy disappeared. Horror and fear gripped the city. Neighbourhoods went silent. Suspects were questioned, suspicion and alarm mounts. No arrests were ever made.

When Lieutenant Detective Damiano discovers the cold case many years later and learns that the three suspects are still alive, she's hooked, on what cops call a Detective's Case. Her partner, Detective Pierre Matte, hesitantly agrees to work with her. They meet Kathryn Flynn, the ninety-year-old mother, who has kept meticulous files throughout the years--her hope has never faltered. Damiano and Matte rediscover what binds them, a reckoning for the murderers among us and justice for the victims who have no voice.