Read an Excerpt from A PLACE OF SECRETS, a New Northern Gothic Mystery from Shane Peacock

Shane Peacock, one of Ontario’s most accomplished storytellers, returns with A Place of Secrets (Cormorant Books), the second novel in his acclaimed Northern Gothic Mysteries series. Set against the eerie stillness of a small Ontario town, the book opens with what seems to be a straightforward tragedy. Evelyn Massey, a beloved centenarian, is found dead in her home just after Christmas. But when Sergeant Alice Morrow discovers traces of poison in the elderly woman’s system, and a decades-old skeleton hidden in her basement, the story transforms into a chilling investigation that spans sixty years.

As Morrow delves deeper, she calls upon former NYPD detective Hugh Mercer to help her unravel the threads of Evelyn’s mysterious past. Together, they uncover a trail of lost love, quiet disappearances, and long-buried sins that refuse to stay hidden. What begins as one suspicious death evolves into a haunting exploration of how secrets can shape a town — and how danger can live quietly among its residents. Peacock builds suspense with precision, crafting a story that is as psychologically rich as it is unsettling.

With A Place of Secrets, Peacock delivers yet another gripping novel steeped in atmosphere, emotion, and moral complexity. His Ontario landscape feels at once familiar and haunted, a place where history seeps into every corner. Through Morrow’s sharp and determined perspective, Peacock examines what people will do to protect the truths they cannot face. The result is a compelling and deeply human mystery that lingers long after the final page.

We're thrilled (literally) to share this excerpt from the new novel, right here on Open Book!

An Excerpt from A Place of Secrets by Shane Peacock

Alice Morrow thought she was seeing a ghost. Sitting in her cruiser at the top of the snowy lane, nearly dozing off as the sun descended too early again on a January day, she saw lights come on in the farmhouse. That was impossible. There was no one there. Hugh Mercer had left weeks before. Left without a sound. Gone back to his wife, for all she knew. There hadn’t been any tire tracks in the snow going up the lane the other two days she had come here either. Why she was doing this, she couldn’t quite say. She had been here for hours this time, much longer than the previous days, just staring down at the house, seeing the white everywhere around her like blankets without warmth in this ugly northern beauty. Perhaps she liked to look at the shells of things rather than the real thing? The real thing hurt too much. The remnants of Hugh Mercer’s stay here were enough: the house he had inhabited, the memories of him, the scent of him — they were enough. Just like the remnants of her first love, the love she had killed. She couldn’t see that boy’s face anymore. Her boy. Neither could she see Hugh’s after just a few weeks. A tear fell onto her cheek, and she wiped it so hard it was as if she’d struck herself. 

The next morning, she thought of asking Sal to go out and check on the house, but that would involve either letting her know that she had been there — three times — or revealing how much she cared for Mercer, and she couldn’t have any of that. But she wondered about the lights. She wondered too about the lack of them in the other farmhouses she had vaguely seen dotting the quilt of snow in the valley. Grey dots in the near-black. People in the dark. They had either gone to bed early or hadn’t felt the need for light. Would that happen many other places in the world?

It made her think too of the lights never coming on in another house just a few concession roads over on New Year’s Eve. And that made her think of the body again. The one in the basement.

“That’s why I’m here, near where Mercer used to live,” she assured herself. “It’s because of the body. I need him to help me make it make sense.”

By mid-afternoon, she couldn’t stand it anymore. She had his cell number, but there was no way she was calling him. Who knew who would be within earshot or perhaps even answer the call. She drove out to the farmhouse. By the time she got there, the sun was descending. When she reached the bottom of the lane, she saw his car sitting outside the garage, but it was hidden from any view anyone could have of his place from a distance. She smiled.

There was no sign of life inside, even when she slammed the door of the cruiser a little harder than usual. She marched up his front walkway and tried to make her footfalls as heavy as possible. She smiled again as she recalled him saying that no one around here made any noise when they walked.

She knocked.

Nothing.

She knocked again. The lights came on in the second-floor window. She looked up and saw him, like a vision gazing down at her from upstairs. His bedroom. Even from the front door, even in the darkness, she could tell he was wearing his bathrobe at four-thirty in the afternoon. His hair, that full head of black hair with lovely streaks of grey, looked dishevelled. She wondered if he was naked underneath. Naked, just as she’d always insisted he be before they were more than a few steps into his room. She resisted the tingle that gave her. She resisted the image of him naked. A big man, an American, a homicide detective. An intelligent man. A man with feelings bursting to come out. 

She could hear him descending the staircase. That made her think of the article she had read in an old Time magazine about how women’s senses of hearing and smell are so much better than men’s. 

She didn’t say anything when he opened the door. He had once said if a scriptwriter were writing dialogue between the two of them, his would be twice as long as hers.

I’m here to talk about the body, she told herself, the body in the basement and the old woman upstairs.

“Sergeant Morrow,” he said to her.

“Detective Mercer.”

“I didn’t leave.”

“I can see that.”

He looked at her for a moment, stared right into her eyes. His eyes were soft in the falling light, and caring, and it scared her.

“Come on in and I’ll explain why.”

Her first instinct was to say no, but she went in.

_______________________________

Shane Peacock has been published in twenty languages in eighteen countries. The first book in the Northern Gothic Mystery series, As We Forgive Others, was published in 2024 to great acclaim and won the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence for Best Crime Novel Set in Canada. He has won the Junior Library Guild of America Selection seven times, the Arthur Ellis Award / CWC Award of Excellence three times, and has been shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award and the TD Canadian Children’s Literature Award. His young adult novels include the Boy Sherlock Holmes series, the Dylan Maples Adventures, The Dark Missions of Edgar Brim trilogy, The Book of Us, and Show. He lives in Cobourg, Ontario, with his wife, journalist Sophie Kneisel.