Karl Alberg

To Karl Alberg a quiet coastal town is exactly what he needs to soothe a psyche that's been battered by big-city police work. But this gentle paradise has more than its share of secrets. Bees buzz among the roses, and the local librarian is attractive, intriguing, and unattached. Perhaps he has at last come in from the cold. But a murder in small town can conceal a lot of secrets—some of them bleak enough to make a man yearn for some nice straightforward urban crime.

Karl Alberg used to be a big-city cop solving crimes involving gangsters, drug lords, real low-lifes. He can't possibly be stumped by a murder in small town? But he is. The woman was found propped against a tree, her pretty face scrubbed clean, and her slender neck slit from one side to the other. And that is all anyone can tell Alberg. Her name? Not so much. So Alberg hires a local artist to draw her picture; maybe someone will recognize her…without, you know, the sliced-up neck. It's a brilliant idea. The answers pour in. And they all point to one potential suspect.

British Columbia's Sunshine Coast isn't always so sunny for Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg. Although Alberg is effectively the police chief, the most pressing thing on his desk right now is the spunky old lady who has apparently escaped from her retirement home. Zoe Strachan has a comfortable house, built on British Columbia’s Sunshine Coast: secluded, private, far away from the past she has left behind. Beautiful and enigmatic, Zoe has no friends and ­seemingly ­no family. Until her brother shows up one day and threatens to reveal the secret she thought was buried forever.

It's midsummer in British Columbia, and it's hot. Murderously hot, as RCMP Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg finds when his day at the beach with his ex is cut short by the discovery of a fresh corpse. And back in Sechelt, a nuisance call from an eccentric redneck swiftly leads Alberg into a psychological Gordian knot and a second crime a decade old.

In the seaside village of Sechelt, Emma O’Brea prepares a dinner to celebrate six years of marriage: ­a union she has polished to gleaming perfection, along with her showcase home. The next morning her husband leaves for work, never to return. At the same time, in nearby Vancouver, a simple-minded stock boy named Eddie Addison defends his tattered pride against the unwitting slights of a college girl, unleashing his rage in an act that will have far-reaching consequences.

Four times in his 10-year search for the perfect woman, Gordon Murphy has been wrong. Now, he's set his sights on Cassandra Mitchell—despite the fact that she's living happily with Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg of the RCMP. Murphy is educated, attractive, wealthy—and a killer.

From the doyenne of detective novels and the inspiration for the major TV series Murder in a Small Town (starring Rossif Sutherland and Kristin Kreuk), the eighth Karl Alberg detective story—is he the detective or the suspect? Maria Buscombe was a housewife living in Sechelt, British Colombia, until seven years ago when she suddenly abandoned her family. Now it seems she has returned—just in time to be murdered. What made her leave? What made her return? And who was sending her money and photographs of her daughter all that time?

Sullen and withdrawn, homesick and angry, fourteen-year-old Eliot Gardener has been headed for trouble ever since his family moved from Nova Scotia to the quiet coastal Sunshine Coast of British Columbia. But not like this. He’s also, apparently, a double-murderer, having whacked both of his parents with a machete. Only, he can't remember why! Some say Eliot is a bad seed. Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg doesn't buy that. But the case weights heavily on him, for he knew the Gardeners and he should have seen something coming.

Three people have been found murdered, by someone known as "the avenging Angel," a killer who has assumed the responsibility of ridding the village of those who sin, those who betray. This latest case also brings with it some life-changing surprises for Alberg and his romantic interest and soon-to-be wife, town librarian Cassandra Mitchell. But theirs are only two of the lives that will be irreparably changed by the murderous activities of an angel straight from hell.