Véhicule Press

Whispering City

Horace Brown

Quebec City crime reporter Mary Roberts is about to leave her desk for the day when she receives word that a woman has been struck down in the centre of town. The victim is Renée Brancourt. A former pin-up, she’d once been a big star, treading the boards at the Comédie-Française, until her lover, Robert Marchand, plunged over Montmorency Falls. Renée’s inability to accept his death led her to be institutionalized.

Now on her deathbed at the Hôtel-Dieu Hospital, the faded vedette tells Mary that Robert’s death was no accident. She points an accusing finger at Albert Frédéric, the most respected lawyer in the city, thus setting the young reporter on a trail that will ultimately imperil her own life. First issued in 1947 by Global Publishing of Pickering, Ontario, Whispering City has since become one of the most sought-after Canadian pulp novels. This Ricochet Books edition marks a return to print after seventy-six years.

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Cathedral/Grove

Susan Glickman

Cathedral/Grove, Susan Glickman’s brilliant new collection, comes to terms with the question of legacy—what we leave behind as a species, as citizens, and as parents. Marked by the lucidity and precision she has been celebrated for, the poems encompass the monuments of Western civilization, a climate in decline, and the pandemic. The title is inspired by the fire that ravaged Notre Dame Cathedral in 2019, destroying the wooden roof-frame known as La Forêt; it also alludes to “Cathedral Grove,” otherwise known as MacMillan Provincial Park, one of the last old growth stands on Vancouver Island. In poems of praise and lament for our fractured world—“Everything is becoming more itself / or something else,” she writes—Glickman has tapped into a magnificent vein of lyric richness.

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My Brother's Keeper

Sheila Kindellan-Sheehan

A TONI DAMIANO MYSTERY

Ten years ago, the prestigious suburban community of Beaconsfield, Quebec was shaken by the discovery of the bodies of an ordinary couple in their home. What appeared to be a common murder-suicide—husband kills wife and takes his own life—has baffled two previous investigations. At one point, the son, who had a tumultuous relationship with his father, was considered a suspect. Lieutenant Detective Toni Damiano and her partner, Detective Pierre Matte, attached to the newly-created Cold Case Unit, have reopened the case with their usual confidence and grit. They are met with unexpected challenges and a reality they’ve never had to face before.

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Whiteout

George Elliott Clarke

In Whiteout: How Canada Cancels Blackness, his new and essential collection of essays, George Elliott Clarke exposes the various ways in which the Canadian imagination demonizes, excludes, and oppresses Blackness. Clarke’s range is extraordinary: he canvasses African-Canadian writers who have tracked Black invisibility, highlights the racist bias of true crime writing, reveals the whitewashing of African-Canadian perspectives in universities, and excoriates the political failure to reckon with the tragedy of Africville, the once-thriving, “Africadian” community whose last home was razed in 1970.

For Clarke, Canada’s relentless celebration of itself as a site of “multicultural humanitarianism” has blinded White leaders and citizens to the country’s many crimes, at home and abroad, thus blacking out the historical record. These essays yield an alternate history of Canada, a corrective revision that Clarke describes as “inking words on snow, evanescent and ephemeral.”

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The Human Scale

Michael Lista

Whether investigating a gruesome triple-murder, a fairy tale marriage gone horribly wrong, or a brilliant con artist, Michael Lista has proven himself one of the most gifted storytellers of his generation. In his belief that crime reporting thrives the closer it moves to the human scale—where every uncovered secret reveals the truth of our obligations to each other—Lista builds his compulsively readable narratives from details (fake flowers, a little girl's necklace) others might pass over, details that provide a doorway into the extreme situations he is drawn to. The Human Scale not only includes Lista's most celebrated magazine stories to date, but comes with postscripts that describe his process in writing each piece, and the fallout from publication. Here is long-form journalism in its most hallowed form: brilliant and bingeable.

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