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Like some people recently retired, Mark had taken on a diversion that pretty well takes up much of his time. At one time, he collected baseball cards, a pastime that required him to acquire cards through trades with fellow enthusiasts or winning cards through arcane competitions when the application of Facebook allowed him to accumulate cards more easily.
Several years later, on an airplane flight from Montreal to New York City, Mark glimpses a television show being shown on a computer laptop belonging to a woman sitting in a seat across the aisle of that flight. Mark thinks and then becomes convinced that one of the actresses playing a woman in that show is in fact his first girlfriend. That realization results in a search for the identity of that woman though a variety of methods and sources, an effort that culminates in a rendezvous with his memory.
ISBN 13 (Trade Paperback): 9798823021340
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9798823021333
Like most children brought up Roman Catholic, Richard regularly attended confession. He never quite know why but until he was in high school, he never questioned the purpose, if not the substance of the sacrament. An incident involving a priestly vestment, a confession in a cathedral, overhearing an admission by an elderly lady in an adjacent confessional, the surprising registration for a universe theology course, and Richard leads to a renewal of his faith and an obsession with confession. Further, he accidentally overhears an elderly lady’s admission in an adjacent confessional, prompting an investigation into the balance between the harm caused by the sin and the absolution provided by confessors. Over several months, he finds himself investigating misdeeds that would give rise to exceptional measures issued by priests sitting in darkened booths in which divine forgiveness is furnished. A homeless man without a name is murdered and Richard has found the misdeed that he hopes will be absolved by confession. Although his pursuit does not result in anything approaching exoneration, it does provide the murdered man with a name and a mystery with a conclusion.
ISBN 13 (Trade Paperback): 9798823007740
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9798823007733
He was only fifteen years old and a recent graduate of grade nine when his parents began to request, if not demand that he start earning his own money, a replacement for the allowance he had been receiving from since he was in the fifth grade. From his first employment posting as a golf caddy for $1.50 a round to a series of clerical positions in the Canadian Government, the biography of Mike Butler’s pursuit of mundane jobs is an occasionally aimless search for career, that he finally attains when he passes his thirtieth year. Expecting a future of invaluable employment opportunities, including good paying summer jobs, Mike Butler found himself wondering how he ended up taking jobs that he thought were just as low paying and miserable as the previous generation must have endured. Mike Butler’s labour history includes a tour of working on a golf course, in a grocery store, in a department store selling clothing, in a duty free shop in an airport, a brief stint in a restaurant, in factories making plastic bottle caps and chain saws, in a chemical laboratory, and in a variety of temporary clerical positions in several government departments.
ISBN 13 (Trade Paperback): 9781665555838
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781665555845
Their pursuit of this puzzle would led John and Patricia Delaney through all manner of investigation, from peculiar neighbours, newspaper reporters, policemen, a private detective, magicians, libraries, bookstore owners, and even each other.
ISBN 13 (Trade Paperback): 9781665545440
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781665545433
Inspired by a fragment of a story written by one budding author, another aspiring author creates the life story of someone named George. From a childhood that originates in an adoption, the story proceeds through his childhood involvement in the sudden loss of his father, the destitution following that loss, a difficult adolescence and then to a curious adult life fated to conclude in a ramshackle shack originally described in the five paragraphs provided by the literary collaborator. The Biography of George is the story of a life inspired by one author and imagined by another.
ISBN 13 (SOFT): 9781665500791
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781665500784
In this book, author Mike Robertson chronicles sixty years of playing various forms of recreational ball.
ISBN 13 (SOFT): 9781728305264
ISBN 13 (HARD): 9781728305257
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781728305240
What lies behind the Picture Windows?
ISBN 13 (SOFT): 9781546268345
ISBN 13 (HARD): 9781546268338
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781546268321
The Hidden History of Jack Quinn
A letter written by a seriously ill middle aged man facing the end of his life is found in a safety deposit box after he passes away. The document, immediately thought to be Jack Quinn’s last will and testament, sends his oldest friend on a quest to find his birth parents, his adoption only revealed to him shortly before he died. The search for the identity of the decedent’s birth parents takes Mark Purchell, a man who has been Quinn’s friend for over forty years, from his hometown of Ottawa to a small town on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. Along the way, Purchell encounters and is assisted by a number of intriguing characters, including a seedy but well-meaning neighbour, a stern librarian, a retired police officer, members of the clergy, a newspaper editor, a haughty hotel maitre d’ and a spirited waitress named Elaine. His investigation of The Hidden History of Jack Quinn eventually leads to a newspaper archive and a surprising answer to a departed friend’s last request.
ISBN 13 (Trade Paperback): 9781546200246
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781546200239
The First Communion Murders
Sometime in the late 1950s, on the steps of an unknown church, somebody takes a black and photograph of an assembly of boys making their first communions. Above the heads of eight of the boys, who are all fated to die within the next twenty years, are small carefully ascribed Xs. When the picture is found more than fifty years years later in an abandoned steamer trunk purchased at a neighborhood auction, the pursuit for an answer to the mystery of those marks begins. The First Communion Murders is the story of that search.
ISBN 13 (Trade Paperback): 9781504901994
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781504901628
Experience a series of literary entertainments in The Smart Aleck Chronicles III.
ISBN 13 (Trade Paperback): 9781491849941
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781491849934
Four years later, a second volume of the Smart Aleck Chronicles appears, its intent no less high minded than the standards of lunacy reached by its predecessor, its implementation no less laughable. This time, as in the previous volume, there are pithy and pointless observations that may have appeared in previous publications for which the author may have had responsibility, fictitious biographies of friends and colleagues, several short works of fiction and top ten lists of observations that may be symptomatic of clinical insanity. Further, just to ensure that the reader is not entirely dismayed, there are also several courageous attempts at poetry.
ISBN 13 (Trade Paperback): 9781468524284
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781468524291
These Memories Clear is a collection of forty short stories, of various lengths, genres and subject matter. Many of the stories in the collection are drawn from childhood memories that may or may not be actual recollections. From one page observations to much longer pieces like “Close Enough to Miss” and “The Letter Seven”, it is hoped that this collection is diverse enough to attract the discriminating reader. Well, at least some of them anyway.
ISBN 13 (Trade Paperback): 9781449072797
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781449072803
No plot, no characters, hardly any stories, just a collection of smart remarks and clever lines delivered on a number of subjects for no apparent reason, the literary equivalent of cleaning out the closet. The Smart Aleck Chronicles presents a series of entertainments on a wide variety of seemingly unrelated topics. Sometimes serious but mostly flippant, The Smart Aleck Chronicles navigate the reader through the various lunacies of everyday life without evident purpose.
There are sarcastically earnest letters to the editor, fictional chronologies, biographies of people who may or may not have existed, erudite comments on the issues that may have seemed important at one time or another, extremely short stories, and lists of ridiculous observations on the hilarity of being or doing just about anything. The Smart Aleck Chronicles makes no effort to be anything other that what it appears to be, whatever that is.
ISBN 13 (Trade Paperback): 9781434330628
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781467821339
Paul Waite is a hopelessly middle aged man with two sons, a heart condition and a conventional disposition. He unexpectedly loses his wife of 20 years to a traffic accident. Gone and Back follows Mr. Waite as he makes his farewell to her. In finalizing her affairs after she is gone, Paul comes across a startling discovery, a clue to a mystery regarding his wife that he is determined to solve, even if it threatens his memories of her and their marriage.
ISBN 13 (Trade Paperback): 9781425973971
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781467802284
Memories of growing up on the West Island of Montreal during the 1950s and early 60”s are the subject of this aptly entitled collection of fourteen short stories. Sometimes hopelessly conventional and sometimes strangely surprising, each story is a remembrance by a now middle aged man who realizes that his future may now reside mainly in his past. Whether looking back on his first girlfriend, some of his school day adventures, or his relationship with the Almighty, Parts of A Past is a whimsical retelling of events that most will recognize, if not revere as being similar to their own.
ISBN 13 (Trade Paperback): 9781420858105
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781463498542
This small collection of eight short stories is an impressive anthology of distinctive stories told in distinctive ways by an author who cannot seem to settle on one particular type of story or one particular style of writing. There is the magnificently moody and darkly apocalyptic Sky Blue Silence I with it nightmare future described in curiously deadpan way, the colour of fairy take whimsy of Eli Martin and the Magic Duck, the fantasy satire of Dream Zingers, the surprising mystery of Mistaking Patricia and the intuitive though unpolished human dramas played out in Mutiny Over the Taking of Tea and Toast and the title story, Casting Shadows. The story are short, easy to read, and will give the reader something to think about aside from the $20 he or she just spend on the paperback.
ISBN 13 (Trade Paperback): 9781414044460
ISBN 13 (eBook): 9781414044477
