Nora Kelly Books In Order

Gillian Adams Books In Order

  1. In the Shadow of King’s (1984)
  2. My Sister’s Keeper (1992)
  3. Bad Chemistry (1993)
  4. Old Wounds (1998)
  5. Hot Pursuit (2002)

Gillian Adams Book Covers

Nora Kelly Books Overview

In the Shadow of King’s

Alistair Greenwood, Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, hosts a luncheon at his faultless 17th Century home. Its perfection is marred by the incompatability of the guests and the arrogance of the host. Gillian Adams, an American scholar revisiting the unversity while on sabbatical from Vancouver, finds it distasteful, but she’s truly appalled when the eminent Greenwood is gunned down the next day while listening to her lecture. Involved as a witness, she’s also hooked into the case by her friendship with Edward Gisborne of the Yard, who had come to hear her and remains to capture Greenwood’s killer…
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This debut novel, first published in 1983, is polished in its plotting and its prose and beautifully depicts Cambridge, doing for that ‘ancient seat of learning what Dorothy L. Sayers did long ago for Oxford in Gaudy Night.’

My Sister’s Keeper

Gillian Adams first appeared in In the Shadow of King’s, a novel that garnered reviews like ‘Almost unbelievably, the university bound detective story with all the wit and panache of Innes, Crispin, and Amanda Cross in their heyday, is Kelly’s first novel’ Toronto Globe and Mail . Now the Vancouver author returns Gillian to her faculty post as head of the History Department at the University of the Pacific Northwest where sexism has reared its ugly head in attacks on the Feminist ‘Eff Yours’ Union. Though separated from her lover Edward, a Scotland Yard man, Gillian hasn’t lost her sleuthing skills. While others see the nasty acts as student pranks, she finds a larger pattern of discrimination developing which leads to a prize student and radical feminist losing a valuable fellowship she was expected to win. But worse is to come: Rita is murdered. Gillian’s dilemma becomes whether to look for a personal, or a professional, motive…
. Adroitly plotted, filled with intrigue and intriguing characters, My Sister’s Keeper solves the crimes but leaves the mystery of Gillian, poised between her career in Vancouver and her romance in England, not to mention worry about her mother in upstate New York, open. We publish Bad Chemistry in August, Gillian’s third case. Her fourth, Old Wounds, won the 1999 Arthur Ellis Best Novel Award and has elicited rave reviews upon our December 1999 release.

Bad Chemistry

Canadian historian Gillian Adams finds herself back in Cambridge. She’s set to enjoy that lovely city in high summer and her romance with Scotland Yard Detective Chief Inspector Edward Gisborne, even though he’s tying up a child killing case in Lambeth. Then the death of a research fellow in the Department of Chemistry shocks both the university and the town. Gillian is linked to the victim through old friends and to the Cambridge police through Edward. Ideally placed to investigate Wendy Fowler’s murder, she turns up evidence of venomous professional rivalries and at least one clandestine liaison. Not to mention that Wendy, a volunteer at the Pregnancy Information Service, is herself pregnant. Then a second body turns up. There is no compelling evidence to link it to Wendy, nor to the motives ascribed to the suspects in her death. As the police sift the facts, Gillian looks at the crimes from a feminist perspective, seeing that that science, contemporary mores, and more conservative traditions have produced a volatile indeed, fatal mixture…
. Gillian Adams began her sleuthing career with In the Shadow of King’s and My Sister’s Keeper. Her fourth case, Old Wounds, won Canada’s 1999 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Novel. Ms. Kelly is at work on a 5th novel.

Old Wounds

Historian Gillian Adams drops both her academic career in Vancouver and her plans to spend her sabbatical in London with policeman lover Edward in order to return to her childhood home up the Hudson and care for her aging mother whose heart is giving out. Gillian keeps her hand and brain in with a light guest lecturer load at sleepy rural Stanton College, a campus that seems serene but is soon unsettled by the murder of a student on a lonely stretch of road. It’s a shocking act breaking the rural peace of the area. No less unnerving are the revelations that follow about the girl’s double life and its implications for those known to Gillian since childhood. Facing both her past and her future as her mother’s life moves towards its close, Gillian copes with the opening and healing of Old Wounds. Canadian Kelly is the winner of the 1999 Arthur Ellis Best Novel Award for Old Wounds. Poisoned Pen Press will republish her three previous intelligent, complex crime novels with Gillian Adams: In the Shadow of King’s $14. 95, set at Cambridge; Bad Chemistry 2000, set also at Cambridge; My Sister’s Keeper 2000, moving to Vancouver’s University of the Pacific.

Hot Pursuit

A great city is a mirror reflecting everyone’s dreams and desperation. From Arthur Ellis Award winner Nora Kelly comes a powerful suspense story set in London.

Gillian Adams has moved to London to live with policeman Edward Gisborne, her lover of many years. Feeling displaced, she seeks out her old friend Charlotte, once a brilliant television producer. But Charlotte is sunk in despair, and her daughter Olivia, a young actress, is fleeing from a disturbed fan who may be a dangerous stalker. London, on the brink of the new millennium, boils with traffic, money and a record heat wave. After Charlotte is found dead, events gather towards an explosive climax as Olivia confronts her pursuer and the terrible sequel to a hidden past. Complex characters, diamond-sharp prose and a vivid sense of London old and new draw the reader into a novel of suspense in which love, obsession, tragedy and renewal are inextricably linked.

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