DETECTIVE FICTION – A.M. Potter | AUTHOR SITE and BLOG
FALMOUTH, CAPE COD, MASSACHUSETTS
Detective Ivy Bourque’s hometown in The Color Red & Silver Moon Rising.
(The photo shows the tidy side of Cape Cod. The dark side? It’s in the telling. To download free previews, click the links below.)
Ontario Morning Book Column, Wednesday, January 15, 2025. CBC Radio’s Nav Nanwa invited me to talk about Silver Moon Rising and Detective Ivy Bourque.
Click here to listen to the interview (Duration: 7 minutes).
Synopsis: Author A.M. Potter delves into North Noir. Potter’s latest novel, Silver Moon Rising, the second in the Detective Ivy Bourque series, has been nominated for an Edgar Award (Best Original Paperback) and ITW Award (Best Series Novel).
From autocrats to plutocrats to the guy next door, everyone is lying. ‘What about novelists, AMP?’ Absolutely, without a doubt. But they’re not lying to hoodwink us. Rather, they’re lying to create fiction, to entertain us.
An earlier North Noir post noted that every work of fiction sits on a fact-fiction continuum. On one end of the continuum there is pure fact; on the other, pure invention. Much of any novel sits somewhere in between. Take Silver Moon Rising (Detective Bourque Book Two). What facts bleed into its fiction? The main murderee, Daniel John Fitzgerald (Dan-Dan), is loosely based on John Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr. (John-John), who died tragically in a 1999 plane crash. Dan-Dan Fitzgerald’s best friend, Chase Heaney, is loosely based on Paul Watson of Greenpeace. However, the resemblances are, as they say, incidental. Fitzgerald and Heaney are characters in a whodunit – aka, an entertainment with teeth.
Silver Moon Rising probes political activism and loss, not only the loss of human lives, but the impending loss of an entire species — the right whale. New Englanders have been coming to terms with whale mortality for centuries, as evinced by Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). In Melville’s tale, when humans and whales collide, things unravel. As they do in Silver Moon Rising.
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SILVER MOON RISING, Book Two in the Det. Ivy Bourque Series, has been nominated for an Edgar Award (Best Original Paperback) and an International Thriller Writers (ITW) Award (Best Series Novel). I’m over the moon – the silver moon. 😉
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Review of Silver Moon Rising by Ken Haigh, Author of Under The Holy Lake and On Foot to Canterbury
“Book Two in the Lieutenant Ivy Bourque series gets off to a quick start: a sudden violent death on a moonlit ferry crossing on Cape Cod. The victim, Daniel Fitzgerald, is the son of a prominent New England political family turned eco-activist. His abusive social media posts have earned him many enemies, but as Bourque investigates, the potential culprits multiply, and she begins to wonder if the motive for Fitzgerald’s murder is personal rather than political. Bourque is a likeable sleuth, a clever, fair-minded detective operating in a man’s world.
The author, who grew up in Nova Scotia, is particularly good on descriptive detail, capturing the weather and mood of the east coast setting. Potter is also very good on the details of the police investigation. Readers who like police procedurals will enjoy following Bourque as the bodies and the forensic clues multiply. The book is well-plotted, and the story will keep the reader turning pages until the solution is revealed. This is Potter’s third book (the first, also a mystery, was set in Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula region), and each book is better than the one before. I’m looking forward to the next book in this series.”
Silver Moon Rising, Book Two in the Detective Bourque series, will be released by Stark House Press on September 4, 2024
Review by James White, Author of Cisco and Giants:
A.M. Potter’s new crime suspense novel, Silver Moon Rising, the second episode in the Detective Lieutenant Bourque series, features the picturesque towns of Cape Cod. But it’s not all picturesque for Bourque. Potter does a masterful job drawing the reader into his fast-paced story with engaging interludes describing the region’s climate and colorful inhabitants.
Bourque and her team soon get bogged down with leads and hunches that go nowhere. It seems every Person-Of-Interest (POI) has an air-tight alibi. Forensics helps identify the murder weapon, but that’s all Bourque has to go on. The perp remains on the loose.
Finally, painstaking detective work provides a glimmer of evidence that sets Bourque and a SWAT team off on a rapid-fire chase to catch the killer before another body washes up in Vineyard Sound. Silver Moon Rising will keep you turning pages. Potter weaves a tangled web of characters and plot twists, culminating in an ending you’ll never expect.
Kudos for Silver Moon Rising from the American Library Association (ALA):
“Silver Moon Rising, Potter’s sequel to The Color Red (2023), portrays Bourque as an increasingly confident, intuitive detective, giving plenty of room for this burgeoning series to grow.” – Booklist, the best book reviews for libraries, the best books for book clubs, published by the ALA
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