Joanne Kilbourn

Andy Boychuk is a successful Saskatchewan politician - until one sweltering August afternoon when the party faithful gather at a picnic. All of the key people in Boychuk’s life - family, friends, enemies - are there. Boychuk steps up to the podium to make a speech, takes a sip of water, and drops dead. Joanne Kilbourn, in her début as Canada’s leading amateur sleuth, is soon on the case, delving into Boychuk’s history. What she finds are a Bible college that’s too good to be true, a woman with a horrifying and secret past, and a murderer who’s about to strike again.

As a child Joanne was friends with Sally Love and her parents, but the friendship languished after Sally’s father died and she moved away, eventually becoming a very controversial artist. When the Mendel Gallery opens an exhibition of Sally’s work, Joanne is eager to attend and to renew their friendship. But it’s not so easy being Sally’s friend anymore, and soon Joanne finds herself ensnared in a web of intrigue and violence. When the director of a local private gallery is brutally murdered, Joanne finds that the past she and Sally share was far more complicated, and far more sordid, than she had realized.

Joanne’s husband Zack is the leading progressive candidate in a neck-and-neck race, with the existing mayor, for Regina’s top job. The tough campaigning is well underway when a disturbing threat disrupts the celebration for the opening of the Racette-Hunter Centre — a project Zack has been spearheading, intended to benefit the impoverished community of North Central Regina. Joanne soon realizes that sinister interests are working behind the scenes of the election, and another savage act makes clear that someone will stop at nothing to maintain the status quo.

Joanne’s husband, Zack, recently elected mayor of Regina, is optimistic that he can garner the public support necessary to make Regina a city that works—not just for the few, but for the many. Their oldest son Peter is marrying Maisie Crawford, a woman as clever and forthright as she is lovely. Their lakeside wedding is a dream come true, but when a former lover of a member of the bridal party shows up, the dream becomes a nightmare. Before the bride's bouquet has wilted, there's an act of sickening cruelty; soon afterwards, there’s a murder.

As Joanne Kilbourn-Shreve, her husband, Zack, and their daughter, Taylor, rush through the rain from their cottage to their car, the Thanksgiving weekend they just spent at the lake with Zack’s law partners is already slipping away, burnished into memory as pleasantly as the hundreds of other weekends the Falconer-Shreve families have shared at Lawyers’ Bay. Within weeks, a triple homicide will rip apart the lives of those related to the lawyers who, at the end of their first year in law school, only half-jokingly styled themselves “The Winners’ Circle.”

When, at the age of sixty, Joanne learns that Douglas Ellard, the reserved general practitioner whom she had grown up believing to be her father was, in fact, the best friend of her biological father, the brilliant visual artist Desmond Love, she begins to question not just who she is, but what factors play a role in shaping all of us and in making us who we really are. Joanne is offered the chance to revisit her family history when writer Roy Brodnitz approaches her with the idea of making a mini-series about the close relationship between the Ellard and Love families

Living Skies is producing Sisters and Strangers, a six-part TV series about the tangled relationships between the families of Douglas Ellard, the father who raised Joanne, and Desmond Love, her biological father. Joanne is working on the script with Roy Brodnitz, a brilliant writer and friend. The project’s future seems assured, but before the script is completed, Brodnitz disappears while scouting locations in Northern Saskatchewan. Hours later, he’s found - sweat-drenched, clawing at the ground, and muttering gibberish. He dies in a state of mortal terror.  

It’s August 24, and Joanne Shreve and her husband, Zack, are savoring the last lazy days of summer and looking forward to the birth of a new grandchild; involvement in the campaign of Ali Janvier, a gifted politician with a solid chance of becoming the province’s next premier; and the debut of Sisters and Strangers, the six-part series Joanne cowrote that focuses on her early life. The series is the flagship of a new slate of programming, and MediaNation is counting on a big return. Joanne and Zack’s stake in the series’ success is personal. 

When Libby Hogarth, the go-to lawyer for the rich or famous who have committed heinous crimes, comes to Regina to deliver the prestigious Mellohawk Lecture, she is met with a torrent of hostility and misinformation. Libby Hogarth had successfully defended Jared Delio, a wildly popular national radio host, against charges of sexual abuse brought against him by three Regina women. Her no-holds-barred cross-examination of the women stirred up a rage that still smolders.

When Joanne Shreve’s former student, Val Masluk, writes the biography of acclaimed novelist Steven Brooks, Val once again becomes part of Joanne’s life. The biography is already raising troubling questions about Brooks’s past, and the wedding of Brooks’s daughter and Joanne’s son is scheduled for the day before the biography is published. Both Joanne and her former student are haunted by memories of the seminar that led to the deaths of two people and the murder conviction of a third.