Tag: North Noir

Windows into Other Worlds: Book Gifts for the 2024 Holidays

A.M. Potter2 Comments

To give a book is to give a window into another world. Here are four gift ideas for the 2024 Holidays.

First, a mystery/detective suggestion:

The Lock-Up by John Banville, 2023. Booker Prize-Winner John Banville writes inventive whodunits that also happen to be eloquent and atmospheric. The Lock-Up, a Strafford and Quirke Mystery, evokes the sights, smells, and sounds of mid-1900s Ireland. If your giftee is a fan of character-driven detective tales, giftwrap The Lock-Up for them.

In Winter I Get Up at Night by Jane Urquhart, 2024. Longlisted for the 2024 Giller Prize. Urquhart’s latest novel cements her reputation as one of Canada’s finest historical fiction authors. The novel is a wide-sweeping tale encompassing artistry, education, and politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Sure to please lovers of Canadiana as well as historical and prairie fiction.

Playground by Richard Powers, 2024. Given his wide fictional lens, Pulitzer Prize-Winner Richard Powers is one of the most thought-provoking American novelists of the past ten years. Although the opening sags a bit, Playground soon lifts off and the story soars, a tale intertwining AI and the future of the world’s oceans. The novel is, by turns, playful and disquieting. It is also inventive, evocative, and forward-looking.

Held by Anne Michaels, 2024. Shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize | Winner of the 2024 Giller Prize. Held is poetic without being precious, revealing solid bones under a lyrical skin. The novel won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Some will find the storyline scattered. Like C.S. Richardson’s All The Colour In the World, Held requires the reader to slow down. If they do, Michaels’ cadence and imagery will pull them in.

Author’s Corner, Sunday December 1, 2024

A.M. Potter1 Comment

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

A.M. Potter4 Comments

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

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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

Silver Moon Rising nominated for Edgar and ITW Awards

A.M. Potter11 Comments

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. 😉

Click here for sales information.

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.”