Anne Emery

Winner of the Arthur Ellis Award, Best First Novel Father Brennan Burke is the main suspect in the murder of a young woman. Defense attorney Monty Collins steps up to defend him, but realizes the only way to exonerate him is to dive into the secrets of his past ... Be careful what you wish for, his mother used to say. Yet how many times, in his twenty years defending the underprivileged, has Monty Collins wished for a client who is intelligent, articulate,...

Lawyer and bluesman Monty Collins is used to defending murderers, and occasionally investigating murders himself. But he can't round up the usual suspects this time. The blood-drenched body of Reinhold Schellenberg, a world-renowned German theologian, has been found on the altar of an old church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, during Vespers on Saint Cecilia's day. The man has nearly been decapitated. The controversial priest, once a top insider in the Vatican,...

When spray-painted graffiti appears on the wall of Christy Burke's pub indicating that there's a killer on the premises, his grandson, Father Brennan Burke, is asked to investigate the vandalism. Though not at all keen on probing into the lives of the bar's clientele, he has little choice once a body is found on the property. Issuing orders from a cell in Mountjoy Prison, the pub's current owner wants the problem solved without the police anywhere...

As 1995 dawns in the North of Ireland, Belfast is a city of army patrols, bombed-out buildings, and "peace walls" segregating one community from the other. But the IRA has called a ceasefire. So, it's as good a time as any for Monty Collins and Father Brennan Burke to visit the city: Monty to do a short gig in a law firm, and Brennan to reconnect with family. And it's a good time for Brennan's cousin Ronan to lay down arms and campaign for election...

The ninth mystery in a series. Twelve-year-old Bonnie MacDonald - the beloved stepdancing, fiddling youngest member of Cape Breton's famed Clan Donnie band - vanishes after a family party. There was no stranger spotted lurking around, but no one thinks for one minute that Bonnie ran away. Maura MacNeil, cousin to Clan Donnie, offers her husband's legal services to the family as the police search for the missing girl. But fame attracts some strange...

The murdered body of Sorcha the prophetess, is discovered following a lavish banquet at the Maguire castle in 16th-century Ireland. In the present day, a dig commences on the land, and not only is a body discovered, but a sheaf of prophecies. Who killed Sorcha? There has been a guesthouse on the Tierney land in County Fermanagh for hundreds of years. Now Tierney's Hotel is, faced with a development that will block the hotel's best feature, its view...

Declan Burke fled Ireland forty years ago and never looked back. Now settled in New York, he thinks he's put the old country behind him, until he reads the obituary of one Cathal Murphy. The obituary, he sees at once, is not about Murphy at all. It is a coded indictment of Burke's own life - and an announcement of his impending death. Halifax lawyer Monty Collins investigates the obit with its allusions to Burke's IRA past. Collins gets no help from...