Detective Bourque’s Hometown

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.)

CBC Radio One ‘Ontario Morning’ Interview with A.M. Potter

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).

Author’s Corner, Sunday December 1, 2024

A.M. (Andy) Potter will be at AUTHOR’S CORNER at Christmas On The Bay Market, Meaford, Ontario. 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, Sunday, December 1st. Signed copies of Bay of Blood, The Color Red, and Silver Moon Rising available for purchase.

Free to All | Free Parking

Location: Meaford Hall and Cultural Centre (12 Nelson St East, Meaford, ON). Directions | Website

Kudos from Publishers Weekly for Silver Moon Rising

Silver Moon Rising (Detective Bourque #2) by A.M. Potter. Stark House. ISBN 979-8-88601-100-5

Publishers Weekly Review: Potter’s atmospheric second procedural featuring Lt. Ivy Bourque of the Cape & Islands Detective Unit is even better than its predecessor (The Color Red). At the outset, Bourque is called to a Martha’s Vineyard ferry to help locate Daniel Fitzgerald, the handsome young scion of a powerful New England dynasty, who vanished during a nighttime ferry crossing. After investigators find Daniel’s body, knifed in the heart, Ivy learns that he had recently severed ties with his family and devoted himself to various social causes, including cleaning up the Appalachian Trail, fighting climate change, and protecting whales. His protest methods occasionally got him in trouble with the law and courted controversy. When more people — some linked to Daniel — are stabbed to death, Ivy must figure out which of Daniel’s enemies, including Massachusetts politicians and corporate whaling interests, are angry enough to kill. Potter spends worthwhile time illustrating how Ivy’s background in organic chemistry benefits her investigative work, and evokes his brackish, blood-soaked setting with aplomb. This series continues to impress. – Publishers Weekly, Sept 2024

To purchase Silver Moon Rising, click here for information.

Silver Moon Rising: Fact vs. Fiction

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.

For sales information, click here.

To preview the novel, download a free teaser: Download