When Gerry Coneybear, a cheerful young artist, comes to her Aunt Maggie's funeral, she is shocked to learn that she has inherited her aunt's rambling 200-year-old waterfront home. Unfortunately, the house comes with a multitude of her aunt's cats as part of the bequest. As Gerry fends off the greedy, jealous relatives and the mysterious part-time housekeeper, she gradually comes to realize that her aunt may have been murdered. Cats, teacups, horticulture and art come together to help Gerry...

Gerry Coneybear has her hands full. Between her work as a cartoonist and children's book author, raising one-year-old Dot with partner Doug, and caring for the 19 cats her late aunt left her--along with the rambling old house known as The Maples--life in the village of Lovering on the Ottawa River is anything but quiet. Add a busy social calendar, and Gerry is already stretched thin.So what does she do? She signs up for a three-month, once-a-week art conservation internship in down...

Gerry Coneybear is back from vacation and settling in for the last three months of her pregnancy -- or trying to settle. She's busy with her work as a cartoonist and children's book author; looking after the twenty cats her aunt bequeathed her along with the big old house on the Ottawa River; and trying to blend her solitary life with her cats with that of her boyfriend Doug and his three almost adult sons.Gerry is nervous about navigating motherhood for the first time without her ...

Housekeeper Prudence Crick expects a peaceful month by the river housesitting at The Maples, her employer Gerry Coneybear's beautiful old home. (And cat-sitting Gerry's twenty cats, too!) But instead of peace she gets trouble. Ghosts of the past haunt her, including her murdered bank robber ex-husband. And she's bedevilled by the present. When two houses are burned to the ground in suspicious circumstances, she's drawn to the scene of the crime and into the lives of its victims, including ...

It's late spring and young artist Gerry Coneybear and her twenty cats are thrilled to finally be able to get out of the house and into the garden surrounding her 200-year-old house on the Ottawa River. But Gerry is having a time keeping her curious cats in their own yard, safe from the new neighbours' large dog. Her neighbours' marriage isn't quite what it should be, and when the philandering husband is murdered, the wife is the obvious suspect. Or ought to be. As events unfold next door, ...

Trying to beat the mid-winter blahs by snowshoeing and cross country skiing when she’s not teaching art history at a local college (or being driven crazy by her numerous cats, cooped up in her rambling old country home), Gerry Coneybear thinks she has her busy life under control. That is, until she rescues her neighbour’s injured cat. Then a body pops up where she’d least expect it. And she even knows the victim – slightly. From gossiping with friends to discussing events while baking at h...

When the poet Eleanor Brandon dies, an apparent suicide, Peter Forrest, her former student, sometime lover and now a married professor, is asked to be her literary executor. He agrees, although he makes it clear that he is only interested in bringing her poetry to publication, not in dealing with the legacy of her social activism on behalf of Chinese dissidents. But after a trip to China, where he and his wife are adopting a third Chinese orphan, Peter finds himself drawn into not only the...

It's Christmas time but many of Gerry Coneybear's friends are away for the holidays and she has no family to celebrate with at the Maples, the old house bequeathed to her by her aunt. Just the 23 cats her aunt left her with. When Gerry first finds a bone in her bedroom, naturally she assumes it's a chicken bone one of the cats has dragged in from the garbage. But it turns out to be from a skeleton buried under the floorboards in the shed where her firewood is stored. On the up side, the sk...

It's April 1st and young artist Gerry Coneybear, inheritor of her Aunt Maggie's big old house The Maples (and her aunt's twenty cats!), wishes her mountain of bills was a joke. She's just self-published her children's book The Cake-Jumping Cats of Dibble, and that cost money. Plus the valuable painting she was hoping to sell is missing from the auctioneers'. And on top of everything else, her kitten Jay is acting weird, keeping her up at night. It's almost as if the cat's possesse...

Struggling mystery author Claire Denman is enjoying a relaxing vacation at her brother's secluded house in the Sunshine Coast of British Columbia after helping a wealthy elderly woman move her cats across the country. The woman happens to be the wife of the man Claire had an affair with 30 years ago and she happens to be renting Claire's brother's rental property next door. Claire's days are filled with writing poetry, birdwatching, and exploring the nearby town. But then strange things be...

“Every war has turning points and every person too.”Fifteen-year-old Daisy is sent from Manhattan to England to visit her aunt and cousins she’s never met: three boys near her age, and their little sister. Her aunt goes away on business soon after Daisy arrives. The next day bombs go off as London is attacked and occupied by an unnamed enemy.As power fails, and systems fail, the farm becomes more isolated. Despite the war, it’s a kind of Eden, with no adults in cha...

Tess is feeling burnt out from her uninspiring job and her busy city lifestyle. Even her personal relationships make her feel as if she’s simply drifting through life rather than living it to the full. Having tragically lost her mother a few years earlier, she knows she owes it to herself to make so much more of the precious opportunities life offers.Her godmother Luna, who leads a very simple existence in a rustic cottage in the North Queensland rainforest, is also at something of...