Four Canadian books you need to read this summer

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Whether you’re headed to the beach, the cottage or the backyard, it’s always a good idea to take along a mixed bag of Canadian-made reading material.

A Most Puzzling Murder
Bianca Marais
MIRA
Famed enigmatologist Destiny Whip is faced with a life-and-death dilemma in this interactive novel, billed as “a quirky, humorous locked-room murder mystery with riddles and puzzles for the reader to solve.”
A reclusive orphan, Destiny is lured to a peculiar island castle with a promise that her family’s deepest secrets will finally be revealed to her. Accepting a challenge to solve a series of mysteries surrounding the castle’s enigmatic owners, the Scruffmore clan, she explores secret passages, decodes cryptic messages and discovers that one of the Scruffmores is in grave danger.
A murder is afoot, and the intended victim’s life is in Destiny’s hands.

The Paper Birds
Jeanette Lynes
HarperCollins
Speaking of enigmas, did you know Canada had a Bletchley Park-like code-breaking operation during the Second World War?
Canadian women who worked at the top-secret Ontario location were a remarkably tight-lipped bunch. When the war ended, they were told to never speak of their roles at Canada’s first “cryptographic bureau,” and many took the secret to the grave.
When the bureau’s existence was publicly acknowledged a few years back, author Jeanette Lynes (The Apothecary’s Garden), was inspired to create fictional codebreaker Gemma Sullivan, a recent high-school graduate who lands a job at a bureau in Mimico, Ont., in 1943.
Raised by her elderly, puzzle-loving Aunt Wren, Gemma’s home life is complicated by the need for secrecy. Before long, her work life is complicated by a different secret — a budding relationship with a handsome German-Canadian prisoner of war held in a nearby PoW camp.

Lowfield
Mark Sampson
Now or Never Publishing
Divorced, insomniac New Brunswick cop Riley Fuller is haunted by a traumatic past event when he arrives in the village of Lowfield, on Prince Edward Island. Riley needs a quiet space to rest and heal. Little does he know there’s likely to be more trauma in his future after he decides to restore a dilapidated old mansion that’s been in his family for generations.
Since the village was abandoned decades ago, and the house has sat empty for 60 years, there may be a good reason why nobody lives there. Well, maybe not a good reason — more likely a sinister one.

Crash Test
Amy James
Avon
Formula One race-car driver Travis Keeping’s love life hits the skids when a multi-car crash leaves his boyfriend clinging to life in a French hospital. Travis and Formula 2 driver Jacob Nichols have kept their romance a secret for the past year, and it’s beyond awkward when Travis meets the parents at Jacob’s bedside.
It’s even more awkward when Jacob wakes up from a coma and realizes he has to make a heartbreaking choice — disappoint his homophobic family or put the brakes on his relationship. Either way, recovery is going to be the pits.