20 Award Honours, Including:
2019 Fiction Winner, Whistler Independent Book Award
Judged by The Canadian Authors Association
2020 Winner, Ink & Cinema Showcase's The Crime List Award for Books.
2019 Hon. Mention Writer's Digest Self-Published Ebook Awards, for Mystery Fiction
2019 Bronze Medal IPPY Awards, for Regional Fiction: Canada East
2018 Finalist, Sarton Woman's Book Awards for Historical Fiction
2017 Finalist, Arthur Ellis Award for manuscripts
Judged by Crime Writers Of Canada
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1868 Ottawa
Father of Canadian Confederation T. D'Arcy McGee is assassinated. As the Prime Minister cradles his friend's bloody head, he blames transplanted Irish terrorists: the Fenian Brotherhood.
Within a day, Patrick James Whelan is arrested. After a show trial, Whelan is publicly hanged.
That much is history. Did Whelan do the deed?
What if Clara Swift, a mere slip of a girl, sees the trace-line of a buggy turn off Sparks Street, moments after the murder? What if Clara, who understands her dead mentor's coded notes, forges an unlikely alliance with the investigator--and ends up a trusted ally of both the condemned man's widow and the Prime Minister's wife?
Celtic Knot.
It's reimagining a crisis that tested a nation.
It's history with a mystery.
It's A Clara Swift Tale.
And it all begins with a shot in the dark....
Ann Shortell was born in Kingston, Ontario, with America just half-way across the St. Lawrence River. That invisible yet powerful line sparked her fascination with the promise and the danger of crossing borders, boundaries and thresholds.
In a previous century she was an award-winning journalist and non-fiction author.
Raised on legends of her Celtic ancestors, Ann wrote Celtic Knot in homage to the Irish storytelling tradition embodied by that immigrant, nation-builder, and poet, T. D'Arcy McGee.
Ann lives in Toronto with her husband, where she is writing a sequel,
An Irish Goodbye A Clara Swift Tale.
So intrepid young Clara is off having more misadventures--this time in Washington D.C. as well as in both American & Canadian frontier territories.