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Mecca

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 23:40:46 +0300

Arthur Ellis award–winning William Deverell's 1983 bestseller

An extremist warlord is about to unleash the world's deadliest shock troops. The Rotkommando — an army of expert terrorists, political fanatics, and psychotic killers — is armed with a failsafe masterplan. Codeword ... Mecca.

Now the Rotkommando is poised on the brink of a crazed kamikaze mission to nuke Israel and ignite World War III. Only three people on Earth have the power to stop them: a burned-out poet with delusions of grandeur, a devout nymphomaniac with a taste for blood, and a desert guru who communes with camels.

From Montreal, New York, and Washington to Paris, Berlin, and Saudi Arabia, Mecca thunders at white-knuckle speed through the knife-edge worlds of espionage and terrorism, where violence is a way of life and time is always running out ...

Street Legal

Fri, 01 Nov 2013 21:03:38 +0200

A Toronto lawyer defends a hit man as the Midnight Strangler stalks the city in a legal thriller based on the author's popular CBC drama Street Legal.

Toronto, 1980. Three ambitious young lawyers are out to make a name for themselves with their own practice. Chuck Tchobanian and Leon Robinovitch are testing the boundaries of free speech with a pair of controversial cases. Carrie Barr, fresh from her success defending a drifter charged as the notorious Midnight Strangler, takes the most dangerous case of all: a suave hit man who proves to be far more dangerous—and alluring—than she imagined.

Soon Carrie finds herself drawn into a web of terror as a rogue police operation, a ruthless drug lord, and a series of brutal murders threaten to tear the fledgling firm apart. Meanwhile, the Midnight Strangler is still at large . . . and may have chosen Carrie as his next victim.

Novelist and criminal lawyer William...

Stung

Tue, 01 Jun 2021 18:30:29 +0300

Award–winning novelist William Deverell is back with a new Arthur Beauchamp legal thriller.

Lawyer Arthur Beauchamp is facing the most explosive trial of his career: the defence of seven boisterous environmentalists accused of sabotaging an Ontario plant that pumps out a pesticide that has led to the mass death of honeybees. The story zigzags between Toronto, where the trial takes place, and Arthur's West Coast island home, where he finds himself arrested for fighting his own environmental cause: the threatened destruction of a popular park. The Toronto trial concludes with a tense, hang-by-the-fingernails jury verdict. Realistic and riveting, Stung is a propulsive legal thriller by a beloved author at the height of his powers.

Platinum Blues

Wed, 14 Aug 2013 10:16:56 +0300

In this "fast-paced, wickedly funny" legal thriller, a small-town lawyer's case against a Los Angeles record label turns into a deadly media circus (Publishers Weekly).

Living in the Northern California town of Foolsgold, widowed lawyer Oliver Gulliver is headed for a midlife crisis. It doesn't help that his eighteen-year-old daughter Elora has fallen in love with alcoholic former rock star C.C. Gilley. But then C.C. quits drinking and gets to work on a comeback album. Things actually seem to be looking up—until C.C.'s car is stolen, with his priceless demo tape inside.

In no time at all, another band is all over the radio with C.C.'s song, and Oliver finds himself in Los Angeles working the biggest case of his life—suing a billion-dollar record company for plagiarism. But even as Oliver discovers his talent for charming the public, he finds out how nasty the music industry can get. When the stakes skyrocket from plagiarism to...

Mindfield

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 17:03:11 +0200

A psychological time bomb is triggered in Kellen O'Reilly as he begins to experience disturbing "flashbacks" to his unresolved and turbulent past.

It is winter in Montreal. Dr. Satorius, head of Coldhaven Manor, a psychiatric clinic just outside the city, is taken to court by former patients. He is accused of conducting unorthodox drug-testing and brainwashing experiments there twenty-five years earlier.

The much-publicized trial and the full-scale police investigation into a series of recent murders are among events which draw Kellen O'Reilly and the dynamic and Sexy Sarah Paradis — trial counsel for Satorius's victims — into an ever-widening web of intrigue and corruption involving the CIA, the FBI, the Mafia, and the police force itself.

As events in Kellen O'Reilly's own past become linked with uncovering secret government-funded psychochemical experiments, tables are turned and Kellen is running for his life.

I'll See You in My Dreams

Sat, 14 Aug 2021 10:16:57 +0300

“A master of the laugh-out-loud crime novel.” — Vancouver Sun

Arthur Beauchamp, after a successful and much-lauded career at the criminal bar, is now retired to Garibaldi Island. His immediate desire is to win the Mabel Orfmeister Trophy for the Most Points in Fruits and Vegetables at the Garibaldi Island fall fair. With his crop picked and packed, Beauchamp is ready to do battle. While waiting for the judges, he can muse on his recently published biography by one Wentworth Chance. It is appropriately florid, with enough catty references to make it readable. And it takes Beauchamp back to his first big criminal case in 1962, the one, in legal terms, that “made him.”

The trial of Gabriel Swift was front-page news. Swift was the Indigenous gardener of Professor Dermot Mulligan, but he was far more than a servant. He was one of Mulligan’s stars, a brilliant mind to mentor. Arthur Beauchamp knows all about that, because he too was one of Mulligan’s best...

The Long-Shot Trial

Wed, 24 Jul 2024 13:16:11 +0300

Arthur Beauchamp takes a break from the courtroom to write a memoir so he can set the record straight about a headline murder case he fought as a young lawyer in 1966. The trial would either mark him as a pathetic loser or thrust him into the top ranks of criminal counsel.

The background: in 1966, a young housemaid was raped by her employer, a callous and vindictive millionaire. She shot him point blank, so it seemed an open-and-shut case of first-degree murder. Enter Arthur Beauchamp, a young lawyer haunted by having bungled his only previous murder case. He is now called upon to defend a case that he is almost certain can't be won. But as the trial speeds through twists and turns, his slashing cross-examinations bring hope that the jury might entertain a reasonable doubt.

In the present time, Arthur learns that writing about his social gaffes, booze, and sex is not easy, especially as his efforts are regularly interrupted by the quirky characters who inhabit his...

Kill All the Lawyers

Tue, 06 Aug 1991 16:46:58 +0300

Arthur P. Besterman, criminal lawyer and reformed alcoholic, was the first to go. Counsel to Vancouver's assorted shifters and grifters, Besterman almost always lost his cases. But a recent victory defending a low-life client might be a clue as to why he was bludgeoned to death with a baseball bat. Then someone takes a pot shot at philandering lawyer Brian Pomeroy after he successfully defends a group of controversial eco-terrorists. All of a sudden lawyers whose clients are less than savoury start second-guessing the ethics of their profession, and going to court becomes possible bloodsport. In a cat-and-mouse game involving the better part of Vancouver's legal community, Pomeroy's firm (the famous Pomeroy, MacArthur, Brovak and Sage from the best-selling Dance of Shiva) pieces together some very disturbing truths about lawyers and the law. As one sleazy lawyer after another disappears, the reader can't help but ponder the wisdom of Shakespeare's...

Kill All the Judges

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 06:32:32 +0200

This bestselling sequel to the award-winning April Fool is a fastpaced, laugh-out-loud story of madness, murder, and mayhem. Is someone systematically killing the judges of the B.C. bar? At least one has been murdered and several have disappeared. Arthur Beauchamp returns from retirement once again to take on the case, this time defending his former nemesis, backwoods poet Cudworth Brown, and tracking down a mystery novel that Brown’s demented former lawyer has been writing – all this just as his own wife, Margaret, has announced her candidacy for the Green Party in a forthcoming federal by-election. Complex, madcap, and peopled with some of the most delightfully eccentric characters to be found between two covers, Kill All the Judges more than proves William Deverell’s mastery of the hilarious crime novel. From the Hardcover edition.

Review

“Kill All the Judges* finds [Deverell] at the top of his game. . . . A vastly entertaining criminal proceeding.” – Toronto Star “Expert crackling wit, laugh-out-loud crime and madcap characters.” – Canadian Living “Compelling. . . . For all its seemingly lighthearted humour, this is a work of great depth and complexity.” – Globe and Mail “There’s a reason why people flock to hear William Deverell. . . . He’s a master of the laugh-out-loud crime novel.” – Vancouver Sun “In translating the drama of the courtroom to the novel, B.C.’s William Deverell is rivalled only by Rumpole’s John Mortimer.” – Toronto Star “A delightful, witty and satisfying read.” – BC BookWorld* From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

William Deverell’s acclaimed first novel, Needles, which drew on his experiences as a criminal lawyer, won the $50,000 Seal Award. Since then he has published thirteen further novels, including Trial of Passion, for which he won the Hammett Prize for literary excellence in crime writing and Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel. He won the Arthur Ellis Best Novel Award again in 2006 for April Fool. He winters in Costa Rica and spends his summers on Pender Island in B.C.

Sing a Worried Song

Sun, 15 Nov 2015 06:32:30 +0200

The sixth novel in the acclaimed Arthur Beauchamp seriesEverything is going well for Arthur Beauchamp in his early middle age. Life is so good for the top-notch defence lawyer that, in a moment of career restlessness, he decides to switch sides, just the once, and prosecute a young man charged with murdering a clown. Beauchamp is confident he can prove Randolph Skyler is guilty. Confident, but still worried and surprisingly blind to how precarious the evidence is — and, worse, to the fissures opening in his personal life.It's a case Beauchamp will never forget, not even years later, when he's happily remarried and retired to a bucolic life on Garibaldi Island in the glorious Salish Sea. As Beauchamp is about to learn, the older you get, the greater the chance is that the past will come back to bite you. In Deverell's latest marvel in his Beauchamp series, Arthur has causes aplenty to sing a worried song.

Snow Job

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 06:32:32 +0200

In bestselling Deverell’s latest hilarious mystery, Arthur Beauchamp moves to Ottawa, and all hell breaks loose Arthur Beauchamp has followed his wife, the leader and first elected member of the Green Party, to Ottawa. But he hates it there: the cold, the politics, and his place in his wife’s shadow. So when a delegation of government officials from Bhashyistan is blown sky high on Bronson Avenue and the shares of a Calgary-based oil company promptly drop like a stone, Arthur is only too happy to jump to the defence of the missing suspected assassin. Deverell’s latest Arthur Beauchamp novel cranks the wily old lawyer’s adventures up several notches, and then some. It’s wildly imaginative, utterly Canadian, and irresistibly funny. From the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

In Arthur Ellis Award–winner Deverell's rambling third novel to feature crafty lawyer Arthur Beauchamp (after 2008's Kill All the Judges), Igor Muckhali Ivanovich (aka Mad Igor), the dictator of the People's Republic of Bhashyistan (formerly part of the U.S.S.R.), declares war on Canada after a diplomatic delegation from the Central Asian nation is blown to bits while visiting Ottawa. Beauchamp and CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) agent Ray DiPalma (the shape-shifting spy who never came in from the cold) go to Albania, where kidnappers have taken Arthur's client, Abzal Erzhan, the prime suspect in the terrorist incident. The Canadian political satire may be of less interest to U.S. readers than a subplot involving three Saskatchewan women who go AWOL from a tour of Bhashyistan during the conflict. The journal extracts written by one of them about the three finding shelter with the Bhashyistani Democratic Revolutionary Front have a sharp focus the main plot lacks. (Oct.)
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Review

"Smart, beautifully written, and really, really funny satire featuring Arthur Beauchamp, one of Canadian crime fiction's truly original characters. The best novel by Deverell ever."
— Margaret Cannon, *Globe and Mail "Though the story is dead serious at its heart, Deverell has much material that is as funny as anything he's written."
— Toronto Star "Fine writing and tongue-in-cheek delivery with acid shots at our political circus, and so close to reality that it seems even funnier. A must-read."
— Hamilton Spectator

"Deverell's imagination gets high marks for postulating what happens when an obscure country declares war on Canada."
— Quill & Quire* From the Hardcover edition.

April Fool

Mon, 14 Nov 2005 17:37:02 +0200

Review

Winner of the 2006 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel
“April Fool thrusts itself brashly into the reader’s psyche like a lumber-jacketed logger at a black-tie affair. Ruggedly individualistic, demanding and determined, its characters are shrewdly etched and realistically rendered.”
— Globe and Mail

“Deverell brings back one of his classic characters, wily B.C. Queen’s Counsel Arthur Beauchamp, in this droll, witty novel about crime in the Gulf Islands.”
— Toronto Sun

“The dialogue crackles, the style is sharp and compelling, and it’s a treat to spend another book with Beauchamp.”
— Vancouver Sun

“Deverell burrows into Beauchamp’s soul, and we see almost everything unfold through his addled but fascinating perspective.”
— *Vancouver Province
“Deverell writes breathless prose, commas flying here and there with exuberant abandon, as he dissects the nuttiness of his various locations. . . . April Fool spills over with idiosyncratic characters.”
— Edmonton Journal

“Hugely entertaining.”
— Calgary Herald

“Deverell is one of Canada’s best and funniest mystery writers.”
— Ottawa Citizen*
“Readers gladly follow all of Deverell’s distinctly drawn characters through tiny outposts on Canada’s West Coast to the courtrooms of Victoria and Vancouver and the fine hotels of Europe. He is a master storyteller with a wonderful sense of humour. The story flows effortlessly, and readers are twigs on the river, along for one hell of a ride.”
— Quill & Quire

“[Deverell] is a hugely amusing and self-assured writer, and when you have his gifts it is hard to go wrong.”
— National PostProduct DescriptionAn irresistible story of justice heading off the rails.
Arthur Beauchamp, the scholarly, self-doubting legend of the B.C. criminal bar (and one of Deverell’s most amiable — and crafty — protagonists), is enjoying his retirement as a hobbyist farmer on B.C.’s Garibaldi Island when he is dragged back to court to defend an old client. Nick “the Owl” Faloon, once one of the world’s top jewel thieves, has been accused of raping and murdering a psychologist. Beauchamp has scarcely registered how unlikely it is that the diminutive Faloon has hurt anyone when his own personal life takes an abrupt turn. His new wife, Margaret Blake, organic farmer and environmental activist, has taken up residence fifty feet above ground in a tree she is determined to save for the eagles and from the loggers. Beauchamp shuttles between Vancouver and the island, doing what he can to save the tree and get his wife back — and defend Faloon.
Part courtroom thriller, part classic whodunit, April Fool sees Deverell writing at the top of his form as he puts these characters through some entertaining and very surprising twists and turns.
From the Hardcover edition.

High Crimes

Thu, 14 Nov 2013 22:42:59 +0200

This high-seas romp from Deverell's Newfoundland to Colombia to Miami features undercover plots, double-dealings, and triple betrayal. This quirky murder mystery features an assortment of colorful characters, including a band of Newfoundland smugglers, an inspector obsessed with their capture, a day-dreaming police scientist infatuated with a voluptuous femme fatale, and a multimillion-dollar cargo of marijuana on a leaky freighter. Proving once again that fact is stranger than fiction, this novel is based upon one of the author's celebrated legal trials.

Needles

Fri, 15 Nov 2013 06:32:31 +0200

Lawyer Foster Cobb prosecutes the mysterious Dr. Au, the West Coast's primary drug trafficker. But Cobb—under pressure of a failing practice and a disintegrating marriage—has himself taken up a long-abandoned heroin habit. With a racing plot and dramatic flip-flops, this literary page-turner takes the reader into the seedy underground of crooked cops, drug lords, and a supercharged courtroom scene.