The author of The Man at the Wheel brings back Scotland Yard's Inspector Peckover in this "valuable addition to the classic British detective" (The New York Times). A femme fatale . . . or a female Jack the Ripper? It's springtime in France—the season of love in the country of romance. But Scotland Yard Insp. Henry Peckover has murder on his mind. The local police have asked him to make some inquiries about Mrs. Mercy McCluskey, a Frenchman's lusty American wife. It seems a former boyfriend of this most-liberated lady has turned up dead. Then a second . . . and a third! Before long, Inspector Peckover has uncovered an IRA connection, a gin-swilling gunrunner, a mysterious killer with a very French twist, and another potential corpse—his own . . . "With bits of Peckover's naughty light verse, a tad of slapstick, and lots of French food: a jaunty, somewhat silly black-comedy." —Kirkus...

A young couple escapes Vancouver and takes a meandering trip down to Panama. In a dreamlike tale, ambiguous in setting and period, a girl child is lost. And Charles Darwin, whose historical namesake found his life work's inspiration in South America, finds his purpose in studying village life. Through two novellas bridged by a story, Michael Kenyon reads the imperatives of biological diversity into inner human life and asks: what happens when we do not accept parts of ourselves? what happens when genre and classification engulf "freedom" and spirit? New storytelling requires acknowledgment of the implicit paradoxes of the unconscious, journeys as much into the psyche as into the world. Kenyon's people often find outer form in their lives through inner exploration and vice versa. This book is full of expressions of escape and commitment, knowledge and acts, introversion and extroversion, feminine and masculine.

Poems of disturbing beauty, examining personal and collective loss.This is Michael Kenyon's third full-length collection of poems. His poetry and fiction have always been alert to the underside, the angularity of the outcast, those forced by temperament or predilection or circumstance to the fringes of middle class life. Here, it is insight itself that pushes the speakers closer to the edge. The world of these poems is dark: Kenyon names and owns our clear cuts, our overpopulation, our fossil-fueled rush to oblivion, the violence embedded in sexuality. This is a book of expanded elegy, clear-eyed, unflinching amid the wreckage of its loves....It is useless tochoose a direction: current must find us.At last we swim away from each otherto make the storm less jealous, old stars freezethe water, earthquakes calve an island, andanother me adores another youinland.- from "The Stars"Fiercely elegiac, jaggedly sexual, The Last House stands on...

Parallel Rivers is a collection of stories that were coaxed into existence from Kenyon's interest in seeing what fiction might learn from film, particularly the German, French, Italian, and Japanese cinema of the 70s. While Kenyon's fictions are often immersed in postmodern sensibilities, adding the rituals and techniques and experiments of film to the process changes some of the ground rules.

Part intellectual mystery and part spiritual adventure, A Year at River Mountain tells the story of an aging actor from Vancouver who has immersed himself in monastic life inChina and is now examining his past as an actor, husband,and father. As his Western consciousness grapples with Taoist philosophies and acupressure techniques, he assesses his life and records the struggles of transformation that accompanysuch thinking. The monastery's Old Master has given the narrator permission to write the commentary he shares with us while raising the question of who reader and narrator really are. Kenyon balances the narrator's interior life with hints of external disturbance and with purposeful missions outside the monastery where village unrest threatens the monks' balance and harmony. Crises build as war threatens, floods occur, and a devastating event leads our narrator to a beautiful and surprising formulation of how things are.