John Degen Book Signing

Join author John Degen for a book signing from the murder mystery series, Seldom Seen Road!

Seldom Seen Road is the first in the Burnt River series of murder mysteries featuring the Roth family detective trio. When the body of local environmental activist Paul Robichaud washes up on the bank of a river in the small northern town of Burnt River, blunt-force wounds to his head suggesting murder, Mark Roth is jarred out of his retirement reverie and drawn into the mystery. Who dumped Robichaud into the frigid spring run-off? Is there a connection between his death and both the largest uranium refinery in the world and the local small-time pot trade? How do Robichaud’s wife, Kim Keranen, daughter Algoma, local real estate developer Gillian Larch, and her pot-head son Bobby fit into the puzzle? And who is The Albanian? Mark Roth has the least solid claim on the art of solving murders, but he is driven by the insistent busybody nature of the recently retired. Profoundly hard-of-hearing after a career in musical performance, and equally disappointed with finding himself alone in his world after the death of his beloved wife, Mark stubbornly and clumsily puts himself in harm’s way to draw out the truth. Constable Jeremy Roth, Mark’s long-lost cousin, is the muscle of the group, patrolling the northern highways for the local police detachment and investigating on the ground. Mark’s beloved daughter, Stephanie, building her name as a criminologist at the university in Thunder Bay, gets to the details of the matter using her academic credentials and her innate puzzle-solving instincts. Mark ignores all official advice and his own precarious health as he digs deep into the secrets of his new town. But the town is looking back at him—observing, plotting—and it may prove more than a match for Mark’s loved ones, and deadly to him.

JOHN DEGEN is a poet and novelist with three published books. His debut novel, The Uninvited Guest, was shortlisted for the 2006 Amazon.ca First Novel Award, and given feature reviews in the Globe and Mail and Quill & Quire.

His essays and opinions have been published widely throughout Canada, including in The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, The Hill Times, Canadian Notes and Queries, The BC Review, THIS Magazine, Quill & Quire, and the Literary Review of Canada. He has served on many boards and advisories in the literary and arts sector including terms as Chair of the Book & Periodical Council, THIS Magazine, and the Canadian Creators’ Coalition. He holds a Master’s degree in Literature from the University of Toronto.

Degen has worked on behalf of other authors for the past thirty years. He is Chief Executive Officer of The Writers’ Union of Canada (TWUC), and Chair of the International Authors Forum (IAF) in the UK. He lives and works, happily, in Thessalon, Ontario, with occasional reluctant visits to Toronto and Ottawa.

Terry Mosher Book Launch

Join Terry Mosher as he launches Jean’s Drapeau’s Baby here at Perfect Books!

It was fifty years ago, that Montreal hosted the Summer Games of the XXI Olympiad. Over two weeks in July 1976, the city enjoyed the spotlight on glowing international acclaim, revelling in the glory and glamour of hosting such a prestigious event. And the man principally responsible? Mayor Jean Drapeau.

TERRY MOSHER, alias Aislin, has been renowned cartoonist for the Montreal Gazette for decades. He lives in Montreal.

Colson Whitehead presents Cool Machine

Join Ottawa Writers Festival for an evening with two-time Pulitzer winner COLSON WHITEHEAD for a conversation with Adrian Harewood on Cool Machine, an exuberantly entertaining novel that brings to life 1980s New York in the magnificent final volume of his Harlem Trilogy.

Ticket purchase includes a signed copy of the hardcover provided by Perfect Books. Additional books will be available for purchase

1981. New York City is beginning to emerge from financial ruin and decline, energized by rampant real estate development and a Wall Street unchained by Reagan-era predatory capitalism. Up in Harlem, successful business owner/master fence Ray Carney has just been named Sterling Furniture’s Dealer of the Month. When the banks won’t give his beloved wife Elizabeth a loan for her new travel agency, however, Carney gambles on one last heist, and finds himself entangled with a legendary criminal mastermind.

1983. To some, Carney’s friend and partner in crime, Pepper, is a stone-cold sociopath. To others, a top thief with questionable people skills. Either way, he’s feeling his age in his troubled gut and his aching bones. When he takes on a bodyguard gig as a favor to Elizabeth, he’s plunged into the alien territory of the East Village art and club scene. Luckily for him, whether you’re uptown or down, everyone speaks the same language of violence—Pepper is a native speaker.

1986. Carney has always been haunted by his inability to save his cousin Freddie. Now, twenty years after Freddie’s death, he has a chance to rescue Freddie’s son from the violent forces of the city. But coming out of retirement and teaming up with Pepper again will mean risking the safety and security he’s spent decades building for his family, with only one shot to get it right.

Colson Whitehead paints a portrait of a city in transition, where shimmering skyscrapers rise to the heavens as displaced people huddle in abandoned tunnels below. In a dazzling display of protean imagination, Cool Machine roves all over the city, from Windows on the World to the Meadowlands, to show that in New York, and in the lives of Whitehead’s vivid characters, it’s what’s below the surface that reveals the truth.