Books by Sharon a Crawford

“Your dad has cancer.” Ten-year-old Sharon hears these words. Not from her parents. They lied. Set mainly in 1950s and 1960s Toronto, this  is Sharon’s story before and after Daddy’s dirty little secret surfaces. Before, she is Princess to her elderly father’s King. He protects her, a shy only child, from best friend, The Bully. Sharon also deals with a bullying nun at school. She distracts herself playing baseball and piano, riding the rails with Mom and railway timekeeper Daddy, and visiting eccentric Detroit and rural Ontario relatives. After learning the truth, Sharon withdraws from Daddy. At 13, she teaches Mom to play the piano. Then Daddy gets sick again, and again…and dies.Sharon A. Crawford’s memoir is a powerful, sometimes humorous, account of a young girl’s lessons learned from difficult teachers - bullying, betrayal, and cancer.

From the moment Dana Bowman sees the redheaded nun arguing with a man on Main St. and Bast Overture receives an email from Eli Foster asking him to find her birth parents, the twin PIs are thrust into a complex chain of events involving extortion, stalking, fire, vandalism, secret adoptions, a bank robbery, assault, and murders.

Dana Bowman has misgivings about starting the home-based Attic Investigative Agency with her fraternal twin, Bast Overture. Especially when the agency's launch is preceded by a break and enter downstairs and a kidnapping at the Mini-Mall involving her son David's babysitter, Debbie Sangwell. Especially when David is kidnapped and Debbie is murdered during the agency's opening ceremonies. Further digging reveals more kidnappings, murders, fraud, and abortion. The twins' investigation also leads to run-ins with police detective Donald Fielding and CKNT TV reporter Charles Haas, the latter who has the "dirt" on Bast. A colourful cast of characters dot the pages, including Dana's ex-husband Ronald, Great Aunt Doris, Mini-Mall merchants Lois and Ray Chalmers, and various nosy neighbours. Hovering in the background is the mysterious "Him." Dana is pushed beyond blood ties in trying to avoid an emotional meltdown as a mother and focus on finding her son. The twin detectives discover that everything seems to be connected somehow. Which connection will lead them to David, and to Debbie's murderer? Will they be too late for David?

Murder, attempted murder, sexual abuse, kidnapping, missing persons, vengeance, revenge, suicide, gambling, explosions, vehicular mishaps, indignity to a dead body, even love occur in these thirteen stories. Like all life's happenings, they affect the characters-women, men and children-in their journey through life, sometimes damaging them, sometimes stalling them in limbo, but often forcing them to reach beyond the tripping point. And to get there, these quirky characters frequently do the absurd and the unthinkable, often with unexpected results. The detectives are frenetic, the villains are diabolic, the situations bounce from hilarious to macabre, and the pace is always unrelenting in this collection by a master crafter of the genre.