Award–winning novelist William Deverell is back with a new Arthur Beauchamp legal thriller.

Lawyer Arthur Beauchamp is facing the most explosive trial of his career: the defence of seven boisterous environmentalists accused of sabotaging an Ontario plant that pumps out a pesticide that has led to the mass death of honeybees. The story zigzags between Toronto, where the trial takes place, and Arthur’s West Coast island home, where he finds himself arrested for fighting his own environmental cause: the threatened destruction of a popular park. The Toronto trial concludes with a tense, hang-by-the-fingernails jury verdict. Realistic and riveting, Stung is a propulsive legal thriller by a beloved author at the height of his powers.

A new edition of the Arthur Ellis Award winning crime novel

Arthur Beauchamp, the scholarly, self-doubting legend of the B.C. criminal bar, is enjoying his retirement on B.C.’s Garibaldi Island when he is dragged back to court to defend an old client. Nick “The Owl” Faloon, one of the world’s top jewel thieves, has been accused of raping and murdering a psychologist. Beauchamp has scarcely registered how unlikely it is that the rascally Faloon could commit a savage murder when his own personal life takes an abrupt turn. His new wife, Margaret Blake, organic farmer and environmental activist, has taken up residence 50 feet above ground in a tree of an old-growth forest that she is determined to save for the eagles and from the loggers. Beauchamp shuttles between Vancouver and the island, doing what he can to defend Faloon, save the forest, and rescue his wife. Part courtroom thriller, part classic whodunit, April Fool sees Deverell writing at the top of his form, with a big dollop of humour.

The sixth novel in the acclaimed Arthur Beauchamp series

Everything is going well for Arthur Beauchamp in his early middle age. Life is so good for the top-notch defence lawyer that, in a moment of career restlessness, he decides to switch sides, just the once, and prosecute a young man charged with murdering a clown. Beauchamp is confident he can prove Randolph Skyler is guilty. Confident, but still worried and surprisingly blind to how precarious the evidence is — and, worse, to the fissures opening in his personal life.

It’s a case Beauchamp will never forget, not even years later, when he’s happily remarried and retired to a bucolic life on Garibaldi Island in the glorious Salish Sea. As Beauchamp is about to learn, the older you get, the greater the chance is that the past will come back to bite you. In Deverell’s latest marvel in his Beauchamp series, Arthur has causes aplenty to sing a worried song.