Strange things are happening in downtown Toronto. An expensively dressed corpse has been unceremoniously dumped in front of Brandy’s Restaurant. Meanwhile, the notoriously reclusive millionaire Paul Zimmerman has suddenly granted an interview to Toronto journalist Judith Hayes. And Judith becomes convinced that there is more than meets the eye to Zimmerman’s rise from penniless Hungarian immigrant to mastermind of breathtaking corporate takeovers. What secret lies behind the opulent marble pillars of his Bridle Path mansion and the white gables of Xanadu, his extravagant retreat in Bermuda? To find the answers, Judith seeks out Zimmerman’s family and the super-rich acolytes of his empire, tracking them down in Toronto, New York, Bermuda, and Paris whenever she can evade the self-righteous demands of her ex-husband and the needs of her loveable but unruly kids. Finally, she and her on-and-off lover Detective Inspector David Parr have to travel to Hungary before the pieces of the jigsaw fit disquietingly into place. The mortal sins of the title give a surprisingly lethal kick to an ingeniously executed thriller.

Anna Porter was born in Budapest, Hungary, during the Second World War and escaped with her mother at the end of the 1956 revolution to New Zealand, where she graduated with an MA from Christchurch University. Like so many young Kiwis, after graduation she travelled to London, England, where she had her first taste of publishing. In 1968, she arrived in Canada, and was soon swept up in the cultural explosion of the 1970s. At McClelland & Stewart, run by the flamboyant Jack McClelland, she quickly found herself at the heart of Canadian publishing. In 1982, she founded Key Porter Books and published such national figures as Farley Mowat, Jean Chrétien, Conrad Black, and Allan Fotheringham. She went on to write both fiction and nonfiction works, including Kasztner’s Train, which won the Writers’ Trust Nonfiction Prize and the Jewish Book Award, The Ghosts of Europe, which won the Shaughnessey Cohen Prize for Political Writing, and has published four mystery novels. She is an Officer of the Order of Canada and a recipient of the Order of Ontario. She lives in Toronto with her husband, Julian Porter. Visit her at AnnaPorter.ca.

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“This is a tightly plotted, well-written, and richly atmospheric novel”

“a deftly written novel abounding with intrigue”