Gail Bowen, winner of the 1995 Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel for her last Joanne Kilbourn mystery, A Colder Kind of Death, is back – with her most daring mystery to date. In the horrifying opening paragraph of A Killing Spring, Reed Gallagher, the head of the School of Journalism at the university where Joanne Kilbourn teaches, is found dead in a seedy rooming house. He is dressed in women’s lingerie, with an electric cord around his neck. Suicide, the police say. A clear case of accidental suicide. But for Joanne, who takes on the thankless task of breaking the news to Gallagher’s wife, this death is just the first in a series of misfortunes that rock her life, both professional and personal. A few days after Gallagher’s death, the School of Journalism is vandalized – its offices and computers are trashed, and homophobic graffiti are sprayed everywhere. Then an unattractive and unpopular journalism student in Joanne’s politics class stops coming to school after complaining to an unbelieving Joanne that she’s being sexually harassed. Clearly, all is not as well at the university as Joanne had thought. Nor is all well in her love life after the casual racism of a stranger drives a wedge between Joanne and her lover, Inspector Alex Kequahtooway. To make matters worse, Joanne is unceremoniously fired by her best friend from the weekly political panel on Nationtv, which she’s being doing for years. Badly shaken by these calamities, Joanne struggles to carry cheerfully on. Action, she knows, is better for her than moping. She decides to find out why her student has stopped coming to class, and in doing so, Joanne steps unknowingly into an on-campus world of fear and deceit and murder.

Who is Spring? Why is death stalking her?Imagine waking up in a shallow grave in a foreign land with no memory. In Killing Spring, we find our heroine, Spring, in this exact predicament. From the moment Spring climbs out of the grave, her journey takes her on a terrifying road of discovery. Who shot her and left her for dead, and whom can she trust? As Spring searches for answers, she finds herself running through a jungle, hiding in an empty wing of a posh resort, and taking refuge on a fishing vessel. Who is she, and why does someone want her dead? With help from several good Samaritans, she might find the answers-If they can be trusted.

Michael Malone and Dick Cherry are two down on their luck friends that reconnect after 30 years and stumble upon a serial killer in Tarpon Springs, Florida during Hurricane Katrina. Night after night as the storm is growing in form and power, the two friends race against time to find the killer. But perhaps they are not ready for the truth? Could the killer be one of them?

First- annual reports include also its Bulletins, no. 1-