The Concord Bookshop - Established 1940

Please join us at the Bookshop on Sunday, March 11th at 3 pm, as we welcome back to the Bookshop Kate Flora, reading from and signing her latest Joe Burgess mystery, "Redemption".

Maine Native and recovering attorney Kate Flora is the author of ten books, including seven Thea Kozak mysteries, the latest of which are Stalking Death, a stand-alone suspense novel, and Playing God, a police procedural.  Research for Playing God led to her non-fiction collaboration, Finding Amy: A True Story of Murder in Maine, which was nominated for an Edgar award in 2007 and was a finalist for the Maine Literary Awards. Her current projects include Death Dealer, a true crime involving a Canadian serial killer, a screenplay, and a novel in linked stores. Flora’s short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including the Sara Paretsky edited collection, Sisters on the Case.

She is is a former editor and publisher at Level Best Books, former international president of Sisters in Crime, and a founding member of the New England Crime Bake conference. Her story “All that Glitters” appears in Dead Calm: Best New England Crime Stories, and her story “Bone China” in the crime story anthology Dead of Winter. Her third Joe Burgess police procedural, Redemption, will be published in February 2012.

Flora's profile of Elinor Lipman appeared in The Larcom Review; her profile of Maine's first Poet Laureate, Kate Barnes, appeared in The Wolf Moon Press and later in an anthology. Short pieces have appeared in ForeWord Magazine and the Northeastern Law School alumni magazine.

She is a former Maine Assistant Attorney General.  She teaches writing for Grub Street in Boston. Flora is an MFA candidate in writing at Vermont College.

Flora is married and the mother of two sons, one into film and the other into physics. She divides her time between Bailey Island, Maine and Concord, Massachusetts, where she wages two constant battles. One is to protect her perennial gardens from deer, woodchucks, chipmunks, and her husband’s lawnmower. The other is to devise sneaky and skillful ways to get the guys in her life to eat their vegetables.

Redemption (Hardcover)

By Kate Flora

ISBN-13: 9781594153792
Availability: Coming Soon - Available for Pre-Order Now
Published: Five Star (ME), 3/2012

All emotionally damaged Vietnam veteran Reggie Libby wanted was normal. Normal wife, normal family, normal job. What he got was a life on the streets of Portland, Maine. Pushing a shopping cart, collecting bottles for redemption. Trying to get right, losing his grip, and trying again. Now Reggie is dead, his body pulled from Portland harbor, and his buddy, homicide detective Joe Burgess, is grieving.

Grief and mourning are thrust aside when the medical examiner determines that Reggie drowned in a bathtub, with bruising that suggests it was no accident. Who would want to harm Reggie? Plenty of people, it seems. His doctor suspects toxic exposure, possibly workplace related. Reggie was working, but it was under the table, and no one knows where.Reggie's ex-wife and his son have been surveying land Reggie owned with an eye toward development. Reggie's cousin Star, a witch who claims he abused her as a child, has been sending him threatening letters.

Burgess has been longing for normal, too, a hope shattered when his girlfriend Chris decides to adopt two needy foster children. Parenthood is not for him. As he loses himself in the investigation, avoiding his personal life, his team is threatened when Det. Stan Perry's nocturnal adventures involve him with a voluptuous hottie and her gun-toting husband, and Stan ends up in custody.

The ex-wife stonewalls. The son has disappeared. The employer remains a mystery. The witch serves up a poisonous brew. Burgess and his team soldier on.

On a wild, rainy October night as Burgess and his team race to save Reggie's brother, a suspect's bullet exploding from the darkness may mean Burgess will never find the answers.

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