Cause a "poker face" ain't just a song by Lady Gaga.Crang is a criminal lawyer. He loves jazz, old movies, Polish vodka, his Volkswagen convertible, and his girlfriend Annie, not necessarily in that order. A wise-cracking WASP with a moral code that owes little to the Law Society of Upper Canada, Crang is equally quick with his lip and fists, but he can tell a fish fork from a pair of brass knuckles when he has to.The clients who come to Crang's second-floor walk-up office ...

This special three-book bundle contains all three novel’s in Jack Batten’s Crang series. Acclaimed Jack Batten is one of Canada’s foremost crime fiction experts, and it shows in this entertaining and relentlessly witty series about the exploits of a hard-living, vodka- and jazz-loving criminal lawyer who deals with both the lives of the rich and the down-and-out on the streets and in the mansions of Canada’s largest city.IncludesCrang Plays the Ac...

Tom Longboat was a hero. A member of the Onondaga Nation, he was born on the Six Nations reserve in Oshwegen, near Brantford, Ontario. Despite poverty, poor training, and prejudice, Longboat went on to become one of the world’s best runners. In 1907, at the height of his fame, he won the Boston Marathon and ran in the 1908 Olympic Marathon. Longboat was one of the best-known people of his day, and certainly the most prominent member of the Six Nations. Throughout his career he had to race ...

Dutiful nurse, hospital matron, courageous resistance fighter, Edith Cavell was all of these. A British citizen, the forty-eight-year-old Cavell was matron of an institute for nurses in the suburbs of Brussels at the outbreak of World War I. Dedicated to the methods of Florence Nightingale, her intelligence and ferocious sense of duty had transformed the institute into a leading training center.When the Germans captured Belgium in the fall of 1914, an organization was formed to ass...

The smart-talking, wise-cracking, jazz-loving criminal lawyer has got a taste for straight vodka and a nose for trouble. No one could ever accuse Crang of being a superhero, but with his usual mixture of innate cool and naive enthusiasm he brings the villains to justice.This 6-book bundle includes:Crang Plays the Ace Crang Mystery #1Straight No Chaser Crang Mystery #2Riviera Blues Crang Mystery #3Blood Coun...

Classic Batten -- on the rocks.Jazz. Cocaine. Vietnamese triads. Dope-dealing yuppie lawyers. Jack Batten's got them all in his second mystery novel starring Crang, the unconventional criminal lawyer with a taste for straight vodka and a nose for trouble. This time out Crang is hired by his buddy Dave Goddard, a sax player whose playing style is from the fifties, but whose unwitting involvement in a complex coke-smuggling ring is pure eighties.Crang's friendly offer to help...

Crang, the smart (and often smartass) criminal lawyer, finds himself embroiled in a mystery while on vacation on the French Riviera.Like all the criminal messes Crang has ever found himself caught up in, this one begins in perfect innocence. As Crang is leaving for a holiday on the French Riviera with his movie-critic girlfriend, Annie, his rich-as-Croesus former father-in-law appears to ask if he’d mind checking up on an errant family member who is said to be hang...

It's been twenty years since Crang, the Toronto criminal lawyer with the single name and the smart mouth, last sleuthed his way through deep trouble and tricky cases. Now, as witty and nervy as he was in such best sellers as Straight No Chaser and Riviera Blues, Crang has returned, and as usual, he's got problems.A client has skipped out on him, still owing Crang a very large fee. The client, a woman of great beauty and even greater treachery, just happens to be t...

Called the "Maharaja of the keyboard" by Duke Ellington, Oscar Peterson released over 200 recordings, won seven Grammy Awards, received the Order of Canada and is considered to have been one of the greatest jazz pianists of all time. This new biography from award-winning author Jack Batten, promises to tell Oscar Peterson's story in acomplete, compelling and sympathetic way. This is first biography of Oscar Peterson for young people.This book is the story of a black kid from a Mont...

Mystery-solving criminal lawyer Crang returns to investigate the disappearance of two rare books.Fletcher Marshall is a Toronto antiquarian book dealer, internationally respected in the business. One night, someone blows the safe in his office and makes off with the contents, which include an infamous forged first edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese that is in itself a collector’s item. Fletcher, who was still in the process...

When his popular hip-hop artist client is blackmailed, Crang stumbles on a porn operation and an unexpected case of murder.Crang is a smart-talking criminal lawyer who doesn’t mind chasing down unorthodox cases. That makes him just the guy to represent a famous hip-hop performer who’s on the wrong end of a blackmail scheme. It doesn’t strike Crang as a confounding case, but in no time, he finds himself confronting an organized gang that deals in porn, stock swindle...

At a time when gay communities were hidden worlds, Crang needs to root out a killer and do his best to right a grave wrong.At the height of the AIDS crisis in the early nineties, a close friend of Crang’s, Alex Corcoran, loses his partner, Ian, to the disease. After Ian’s death, Crang is enlisted by Alex to find the man who infected Ian. Crang searches for the man to prevent Alex from getting himself in trouble. However, when Alex is murdered, Crang owes it to his ...