human-remains-child-cover-red-antonio-6x9-72On November 30th, 2016, while my kids stayed up past their bedtimes, begging me to read to them and pay attention to them, I ignored their beautiful little faces and finished the first draft of Human Remains.

“What’s it about?” asked my new friend and author Su J. Sokol.

What would you do if you found a warm, pulseless man on the ground, with a bag over his head?

If you’re Dr. Hope Sze, you try to resuscitate him.

Then you try to figure out who killed him.

HUMAN REMAINS

the fifth Hope Sze novel

We’re talking human remains literally and metaphorically. In addition to finding a dead man, Hope has to rebuild herself after thwarting the hostage-taking on the obstetrics ward.

“Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. But hope without critical thinking is naïveté. And I I try to live in this place between the two.”–Maria Popova of BrainPickings.org

How do we strike this balance? Look around you. The world is excruciating at times. Imagine if you’re Hope Sze, running into murder and the depths of human perversion. How do you regenerate a sense of hope and optimism that’s still grounded in reality?

That’s part of what this book is about. And maybe part of the reason this book was so hard for me to write. But I diiiiiiid it, as my kids used to say.

Speaking of which, my kids survived my neglect. Anastasia was pretty cool about it. She worked on an Angry Birds activity book and set an alarm clock. She asked me to set it off when I finished, which I did.

Max waited for me to read to him, even though we’d just finished reading Harry Potter and the Cursed Child that morning. I read a little of A Wrinkle in Time, a book I love and first read when I was in grade five.

While you’re waiting for Human Remains to hit the shelves, you can buy my books in Ottawa at Books on Beechwood. Yaaaaaaay!

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You can always make new friends at Books on Beechwood. This lady asked my advice about children’s books, but was intrigued by Stockholm Syndrome and The Emergency Doctor’s Guide to a Pain-Free Back.

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Stockholm Syndrome is available in Montreal at Librairie Paragraphe Books. You can order it through Librairie Bertrand too (more on that later).

And if you’re in my neck of the woods, please support R&L’s Book Nook, The Review, Fassifern General Store, Penny’s Market, and the Cornwall Public Library. My books are also available in New York City and the Boston area. Woo hoo! Full list of retailers here.

I’ll be more active on my blog and social media in the next month or two, as I clean up Human Remains. Cheers!

P.S. Website comment:this didn’t post to Facebook and Twitter. Looks like Mailchimp may have discontinued their social plugin. Why, Mailchimp, why? I don’t know if likes or comments will post through to my blog any more. Sad face. But otherwise, wheeeeee!