What's Coming Up...
I hope your year has been off to a good start!
I’d like to thank everyone who participated in and shared my massive boxing day sale at the end of December.
It’s been a few weeks since you’ve heard from me. January has been… eventful. Between a long-awaited vacation, and getting slammed with back-to-back sickness (nothing serious, just enough to make me cranky), I haven’t exactly been my most productive. In fact, it’s been about a month since I’ve written any new words. Thankfully, I’m starting to get back into my usual groove.
One of the things that’s been taking up some time has been preparing the Barrier Witch omnibus for release. This five-book plus short story collection is currently up for preorder, and will be released February 27th.
If you aren’t familiar with my Barrier Witch series, it follows my queen of chaos Fairuz Arshad as she throws herself face-first into Toronto’s wildest supernatural cases.
“If nobody else is going to say it, I will. Our victim has no eyes.”
I glanced up at my partner from over the purple lenses of my aviator sunglasses. He wasn't wrong. The victim was also missing several organs: liver, kidneys, maybe something else. That wasn't exactly unusual. It was the eyes that threw me. Based on Rowan’s words, I wasn’t the only one.
I sighed and rubbed my neck. Who would have thought a day would come when missing organs would be normal to me?
I took a sip of my Tim Horton’s coffee. It tasted like burnt water. Until my usual place reopened, or at least until I could get my Turkish coffee maker from my parents’ place in Ottawa, it would have to be enough to feed my caffeine addiction. The paper cup was quickly cooling in the late February winds. I held it between my gloved hands, trying to keep the coffee inside at a drinkable temperature as I stared down at the body.
It was hard to tell just from looking at it whether or not this was a Special Crimes case. Homicide should have been handling this, but my partner of nearly a year now, Rowan Oak, and I had been a couple of blocks away anyway on another, far less interesting case. Plus, the missing eyes definitely suggested something not normal. It could have just been someone who liked eyes, or it could have been someone poaching them for spells. Or maybe the human-looking man sprawled out on the pavement surrounded by police tape wasn't actually human.
The Homicide department was going to have a fit either way. I wasn't going to waste time waiting for them to show up. I'd worked Homicide before Special Crimes. It might not have been in this neighbourhood, but it was all the same. This wasn't my first road trip.
Rowan always insisted the expression was ‘rodeo,’ but that didn't make any sense to me. He was from Alberta, everything was about rodeos to him.
The point was, I knew what I was doing, and I knew that every second counted. If Homicide had a problem with that, they should have showed up faster.
This is my most popular series, and going through it again has reminded me how much I love it. I’d always planned to come back to this series/universe, and I’m still holding onto that plan. In fact, I’m almost definitely jumping back into it when I’m done with Heavy Metal Hunters.
In the meantime, if you’ve read and enjoyed any of my books, please consider leaving a rating or review on Amazon. They’re one of the best ways to support your favourite series, and it helps me know what people would like me to work on.