First Chapters of my books

A federal deadline is bearing down on Gasper's Cove: restore the town's crumbling old lighthouse by year's end, or watch Ottawa replace it with a soulless LED tower. While the community argues it out on a storm-strewn beach, Stuart's daughter turns up something the tide was not supposed to give back, a message in a bottle dated 1962 that reads, "Being watched. Help not coming." The coordinates on it point to the exact spot where they are standing. Crafting a Deadline is the eighth book in the...

Craft shows can be dangerous. Valerie Rankin learns exactly how dangerous when the lights go out at the Thirteenth Annual Gasper's Cove Spring Craft Show and only a trolley piled with vintage quilts saves her from a nasty fall. Waiting on the other side of it is Louise Haggerty, a big-city "sustainable fashion" designer who has come to little Gasper's Cove hunting for local quilts and linens to upcycle, and who has her eye on Valerie's Crafters' Co-op. Never risk competition, she says, when...

It is February in Gasper's Cove, the tourists are long gone, and Valerie Rankin is finally about to cast on a pair of socks for herself when the text arrives: Emergency. Get here ASAP before I kill somebody. It is from level-headed Catherine, which is exactly how Valerie knows it is serious. Someone has moved into the Bluenose Inn and shows no sign of ever leaving. Crafting a Cold Case is the sixth book in the Gasper's Cove Mysteries, a warm, funny Canadian cozy series about small-town...

A tourist tells Valerie Rankin that Gasper's Cove is the best-kept secret in the country, and for once the marketing is about to catch up with the truth. A glossy wellness retreat is opening on the island, promising to put the little Nova Scotia town on the map. But Valerie has learned that when outsiders arrive promising to fix a place that was never broken, trouble is rarely far behind. Crafting a Getawayis the fourth book in the Gasper's Cove Mysteries, a warm, funny Canadian cozy series...

When the three sharpest nonagenarians at Seaview Manor invite Valerie Rankin to tea, she expects butter tarts and gossip, not a business proposition. Joyce, Bernadette, and Minnie have something valuable to sell, something they have kept hidden for years, and they need Valerie's help to quietly turn it into cash for their small army of grandchildren. There is just one small problem with the goods: they stole them. Crafting an Alibi is the fifth book in the Gasper's Cove Mysteries, a warm,...

The province wants to merge tiny Gasper's Cove with its bigger, brasher neighbour across the causeway, and Mayor "Mighty Mike" Murphy is racing to seal the deal. So the crafters of the Rankin's General co-op do what they do best: they fight back with stencilled signs, cross-stitched campaign buttons, and a candidate of their own. Valerie Rankin just wanted to run her family store and finish her sewing. Now she is a campaign manager. Crafting with Slander is the third book in the Gasper's Cove...

When a length of yellowed silk turns up in a bin at the Recreate and Recycle Depot, Valerie Rankin's sewing eye knows it is something special: a World War II parachute, the kind wartime brides once cut down into wedding dresses. But this one travelled a long way to a small town on the coast of Nova Scotia, and the story of how it got here reaches back to a secret buried aboard a gold ship in 1939. Crafting Deception is the second book in the Gasper's Cove Mysteries, a warm, funny Canadian...

Valerie Rankin has come home to Gasper's Cove, a small coastal Nova Scotia town where the fishery has slowed and just about everyone makes something: they knit, crochet, carve, sew, throw pots. Her plan is simple. Get all those crafts out of people's houses and into a co-op on the second floor of the family's general store. How hard could it be? Crafting for Murder is the first book in the Gasper's Cove Mysteries, a warm, funny Canadian cozy mystery series about ordinary people, the things...

For anyone who ever went looking for the So You Want to Be an Older Woman manual and came up empty: here it is, more or less. How to Be an Older Woman for Beginners is a collection of essays about getting older, drawn from my Substack of the same name. Written on dog walks and posted from a kitchen table in Nova Scotia, these are dispatches from the far bookend of life, the one nobody hands you instructions for, delivered with humour and a strong suspicion that karma is, in fact, a thing....

Meet Heidi Macdonald: twenty-seven years old, living in her parents' basement, unable to drive, and somehow just hired as a research and communications officer for the Official Opposition in a Nova Scotia legislature that has no idea what it has let in. Memo to Murder is the first book in the Unintentional Sleuth Mysteries, a comic Canadian cozy mystery series set in the world of provincial politics, where the memos are dull, the politicians are duller, and an accidental amateur sleuth is...

Christmas has come to Gasper’s Cove. Krista Willett only meant to deliver poinsettias, not to be talked into sewing forty-seven elf hats for the school concert, and certainly not into another murder. Across town, Kenny McQuarrie has a resized ring, a plan to propose, and three credit cards that have all, somehow, just been declined. Here is the first chapter of this festive Nova Scotia cozy mystery.

All she could see of the body were two legs.

The rest was under the wooden lid.

There, on the...

It is October in Gasper’s Cove, and at Seaview Manor a tea party of formidable seniors has turned to their favourite subject: who’s next. Colleen, who sorts costumes at the recycle depot and helps out at Rankin’s General, is a practical woman who thinks all this talk of witches, wandering cats, and death coming in threes is nonsense, right up until it isn’t? Here is the first chapter of this Halloween Gasper’s Cove cozy mystery.

Chapter 1

“The thing is, who’s next?”
Colleen knew where this...

Chapter 1

It is summer in Gasper’s Cove when an excavator digging a new water line turns up a skeleton wearing a town inspector’s windbreaker. Kenny McQuarrie, the municipal inspector, is a quiet man happiest with his files, his rules, and his bulldog Max, and he is exactly the wrong person to be handed a secret. Asked to find out who the dead man was, he quickly discovers his own boss would rather he didn’t. Here is the first chapter of this Nova Scotia cozy mystery.

Skeletons don’t drop out...

Spring has finally reached Gasper’s Cove, the small Nova Scotia town at the heart of Barbara Emodi’s cozy mysteries, and Krista Willett needs a job that gets her out of the house and away from her son’s report card. What she lands is a season at Harry Sutherland’s pop-up garden centre in the Foodmart parking lot, a boss with a shady past, and the kind of trouble that turns bedding plants into a crime scene. Here are the opening pages of the first Gasper’s Cove Quick Cozy.

Chapter 1

I was a...

Welcome to Gasper's Cove, a small town on the coast of Nova Scotia that doesn't quite exist but will feel awfully familiar to anyone who lives somewhere like it. In this first Gasper's Cove cozy mystery, sewing teacher Valerie Rankin just wants her fledgling sewing school to get off the ground. Then a sewing machine salesman turns up dead in the store parking lot, and Valerie and her Seaside Sewists put down their seam rippers and start detecting. Here are the opening pages to get you...