Paradise Cafe Series

It's July 1936 and Toronto is under a record-breaking heat wave. Charlotte Frayne is the junior associate in a two-person private investigation firm, owned by T. Gilmore. Two events set the book’s plot in motion: an anti-Semitic hate letter is delivered to Gilmore, who up to now has not acknowledged his religion, and Hilliard Taylor, a veteran of the…

Charlotte’s boss at T. Gilmore and Associates takes off on a mysterious trip to Europe, leaving Charlotte in charge of the detective agency. Mrs. Jessop hires the newly promoted Private Investigator to inquire into the untimely death of her son, a veteran injured in the Great War. The police ruled it a suicide, but Mrs. Jessop doesn’t agree and wants…

In a world still recovering from the War to End All Wars and the Spanish Influenza pandemic that killed fifty million people worldwide, and still in the throes of the Great Depression, Stephen Lucas is not just any refugee from the Nazi regime; he is in possession of information that could alter the course of history - but only if seen by persons in…

The newspapers have reported on the arrest of two Black teenagers in a burglary, but did the pair actually commit the crime? Not according to the letter’s sender, Mrs. Olivia Brodie. A resident of the Toronto House of Industry ― “the poor house” ― Mrs. Brodie was running an early morning errand when she witnessed, on the morning of the crime, two men…