John Moss Books in Order

Reflections on the Canadian Arctic blend prose and poetry to question familiar ideas about wilderness. Moss explores how language, culture, and personal experience shape encounters with a region whose landscape resists easy understanding.

These essays and literary imaginings blur the boundaries between criticism, fiction, and poetry. Reading Canadian writers including Atwood and Kroetsch, Moss explores how creative language unsettles established forms and changes the relationship between interpretation and invention.

Toronto detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan investigate a death in a garden pond in wealthy Rosedale. A woman identifying herself as the victim's mistress changes their understanding of the case and draws them into unsettling personal territory.

The discovery of two bodies in colonial clothing draws Miranda Quin and David Morgan into a disturbing investigation. Clues lead from a Toronto demolition site to isolated buildings and a shipwreck, testing their partnership as the danger becomes personal.

An elderly professor's murder brings Toronto detectives Quin and Morgan into the eccentric Francis Bacon Society. Its members owe the victim substantial debts and have motives to kill, while the investigation connects academic circles with a Muskoka summer house.

Miranda Quin wakes beside her lover's body with missing memories and becomes a murder suspect. Investigating his death reveals how little she understood about his life and draws her and David Morgan toward a broader criminal threat.

After an attempted murder, Allison Briscoe cannot move or communicate, though she remains conscious. Dreams place her within the lives of her ancestors, while in the present she must find a way to warn others that her attacker has returned.

Miranda Quin's tropical writing retreat and David Morgan's investigation of a death on a Toronto yacht pull the detectives into separate dangers. Their paths converge back home, where connecting the cases becomes essential to escaping a larger conspiracy.

Toronto investigator Harry Lindstrom accepts a mother's unusual request to prove that her son is a killer. Unraveling the family's destructive relationships takes him to wintry Stockholm and an ancient burial site on the Baltic island of Fårö.

A Vienna detective invites Harry Lindstrom to prove that she murdered her lover, drawing him into an uneasy alliance. His investigation moves between Toronto and Austria as her account links present events to troubling stories from the past.

Anthropologist Angel Harris discovers cave art that connects her story with a young woman living fifty thousand years earlier. As the ancient artist searches for her missing family, Angel faces a survival crisis deep beneath the earth.

On Bora Bora, Harry Lindstrom becomes involved with an actress and her husband, discovering their ties to a dangerous religious movement. Encounters in Toronto and England deepen the case and challenge his assumptions about violence and responsibility.

Angel Harris searches for another survivor after most animal life disappears from Earth, traveling despite having no use of her legs. Her present journey alternates with memories of surviving a plane crash as a teenager.

In a future Toronto, widow Anna Winston seeks refuge from a society that manipulates minds and suppresses language. Generations later, her grandson's poetic sensibility challenges the same oppressive order, drawing him toward the origins of human expression.

Five decades of essays trace Moss's engagement with Canadian literature, language, and culture. Discussions of writers, gender, and literary form connect with his development as a critic and novelist, revealing how reading and writing continually reshape one another.