“Hemlock for Herskowitz!” That’s what the students write in the law school toilets about Professor Mack Herskowitz. Herskowitz (aka “Jerk–o–Twit”) runs his classes like a Marine drill sergeant. He’s bedding one budding lawyer — a former exotic dancer he helped get into the school — but the rest seem to want him dead. And that’s before Herskowitz’s mouthiest critic, first–year law student Tony Albinoni, is poisoned in the professor’s penthouse.

Paul Menzies is an out–of–shape, middle–aged advertising executive, who arrives at work one morning to discover he’s lost his job. Downsized. That evening, he stops by a bank machine to check his finances. Ahead of him, a scruffy young couple is arguing about the state of their own finances.

When the muscular husband, Victor Shriver, loses his temper and smacks his wife hard, Paul steps in and hauls the young thug backwards across the lobby.

Which is the only clear image caught by the bank’s security camera.

Declan Burke fled Ireland forty years ago and never looked back. Now settled in New York, he thinks he’s put the old country behind him, until he reads the obituary of one Cathal Murphy. The obituary, he sees at once, is not about Murphy at all. It is a coded indictment of Burke’s own life. And an announcement of his impending death. Halifax lawyer Monty Collins investigates the obit with its allusions to Burke’s IRA past. Collins gets no help from Burke, who — good soldier to the end — keeps the silence of the grave.

The mayor falls down dead in the middle of a speech, and a university secret society promptly claims credit for the murder.

Clare Vengel is given her first undercover assignment: to pose as a student and penetrate the society. Shes a mechanic in her spare time, and thinks book smarts are for people who cant handle the real world. Instead of infiltrating the club, she alienates a popular professor, and quickly loses the respect of police superiors.

A rich man and a poor man are found dead of gunshot wounds outside a seedy bar on Barrington Street in Halifax. The police declare it a murder-suicide, but bluesman/lawyer Monty Collins – hired to represent the victims’ families – suspects it’s a double murder.

There's nothing prissy, genteel, or insincere in Mike Knowles' work prose. So spare it flirts with cruelty, that cuts scalpel-clean and just as precise, and crackles with the kind of talent and energy that not only makes it difficult to put down, but that sends you frantically looking for his next book. Hard-boiled, hard-edged, hard-core, but never once crossing into parody or pastiche. There is power here, and Knowles knows how to use it.
— Greg Rucka, author of the Atticus Kodiak crime fiction series

Beau Delaney is a bit of a showboat, a prominent lawyer whose exploits have become the subject of a Hollywood film. He's also the father of ten children (many of them foster children). Now he’s charged with the murder of his wife, Peggy. It’s another hard case for lawyer and bluesman Monty Collins. His client is keeping secrets; a mysterious eleventh child turns up and demands to take part in the trial; and the last words anyone heard from Peggy were “the Hells Angels!”

The forests around Dockerty, Newry County, hide many secrets.

Some were never meant to be unearthed, one is still waiting to be buried. At the edge of the woods near the Warren farm, a man hangs in a tree. Two arrows pin him to the trunk.

“Hunting accident?” Orwell wondered.

The sergeant shook his head. “One in the belly, maybe. Two in the belly, that’s pretty good shooting.”

Lethal Rage follows the journey of Jack Warren, a young Toronto police officer, as he enters the dangerous streets of downtown’s 51 Division. Accustomed to the white-bread policing of his previous division, Jack is staggered when he first arrives at his new job. No TV show or movie prepared him for the reality of 51, where the officers wade through the filth of humanity on a daily – hourly – basis.

Declan Burke fled Ireland forty years ago and never looked back. Now settled in New York, he thinks he’s put the old country behind him, until he reads the obituary of one Cathal Murphy. The obituary, he sees at once, is not about Murphy at all. It is a coded indictment of Burke’s own life. And an announcement of his impending death. Halifax lawyer Monty Collins investigates the obit with its allusions to Burke’s IRA past. Collins gets no help from Burke, who — good soldier to the end — keeps the silence of the grave.