I was there when they found you. 

Innards falling from your mouth. Muscle wedged between your teeth. An eyeball in your left hand, nerve endings grazing the cracked concrete floor. 

I studied you in perfect silence, with the same devotion your forefathers studied the embalming arts. Your golden barrel curls, matted with tar.

Elizabeth Urso’s debut Gothic suspense novel, Hail Mary (Rising Action Publishing, September 22, 2026) follows Mary Foreman, who returns to her hometown to help her estranged family during a scandal-plagued election. But when the opening of a decades-old time capsule draws her into a criminal investigation tied to her family’s funeral empire, she must fight to prove her innocence. Not only of recent crimes, but past ones, too. For this is the North Shore of Lake Huron, and the past is always present where the dead don’t die.

We are beyond thrilled to be welcoming many time award-winning author, Anthony Bidulka to our blog to talk to us about his compulsively readable and utterly absorbing new mystery thriller, Home Fires Burn (Stonehouse Publishing, June 1, 2025). Anthony is a Canadian legend of the mystery thriller genre who writes from places and perspectives that you don’t often see represented on the page.