"It is 1927. Young Peter Duvett has accepted a job as an assistant to the elusive portraitist Vienna Linn in the remote town of Churchill, Manitoba. Peter's life is about to change in ways he scarcely could have imagined. Across Canada, Vienna Linn has been arranging and photographing gruesome accidents for the private collection, in London, of a Mr. Radin Heur - theirs is a macabre duet of art and violence." "After a strenuous journey, Peter arrives...

Seventeen-year-old Wyatt Hillyer is suddenly orphaned when his parents, within hours of each other, jump off two different bridges--the result of their separate involvements with the same compelling neighbor, a Halifax switchboard operator and aspiring actress. The suicides cause Wyatt to move to small-town Middle Economy to live with his uncle, aunt, and cousin Tilda. Wyatt's account of the astonishing--not least to him--events leading up to his...

"Jacob Rigolet, soon to be fired from his position as assistant to a wealthy art collector, looks up from his seat at an auction to see his mother, Nora Ives Rigolet, until that day head librarian at Halifax Free Library, walk almost casually up the aisle and fling an open jar of black ink at master photographer Robert Capa's "Death on a Leipzig Balcony." Jacob's fiancee, the erotically accomplished Detective Martha Crauchet, is assigned to the interrogation....

A memoir details the haunting and redemptive events of the author's life, covering such topics as his con-man father's betrayal, the murder-suicide of a houseguest, and his decade spent in the Arctic as a translator of Inuit tales.