Wordfest Presents Ian Ferguson, Will Ferguson & Susan Juby

Wordfest Presents Ian Ferguson, Will Ferguson & Susan Juby

Hosted by Shelley Youngblut

Lucky us! We get to celebrate the returns of flailing actress Miranda Abbott and Buddhist butler Helen Thorpe, two of Canada's most delightfully written amateur sleuths in the sequels to two of 2023's beloved new cosy mystery series. These delightfully quirky characters sprang from the imaginations of three Leacock Medal for Humour winners Ian Ferguson, Will Ferguson, and Susan Juby, who will be sparking mayhem on the stage at Memorial Park Library. The afternoon conversation, hosted by Wordfest’s CEO and Creative Ringleader Shelley Youngblut, starts at 1PM MT and and will be followed by an audience Q & A and book signing fuelled by Owl’s Nest Books. If you can't wait until after the show to find out whodunnit, you can pre-order both sequels and backlist titles here. 

We are grateful to HarperCollins Canada for making it possible to connect you with these entertaining writers.

About Mystery in the Title

From the bestselling authors of I Only Read Murder, a side-splitting mystery of epic movie-of-the-week proportions, featuring the unstoppable Miranda Abbott.

Miranda Abbott will once again be a star. After a very long dry spell that followed her network hit series Pastor Fran Investigates, Hollywood has come calling and they want Miranda back. This time to be the female lead in an oddly expensive movie of the week, filming in Happy Rock! Miranda signs on the dotted line, but her trusty assistant Andrew, a whiz with apps and clouds, thinks this all seems a bit fishy. When Miranda’s co-star makes a grand entrance by crashing through the atrium window at The Duchess Hotel and being very much dead, things go from bad to worse. The great citizens of Happy Rock, including Police Chief Ned Buckley, grumpy bookstore owner and soon to be ex-husband Edgar Abbott, Bea of Bea’s B&B, and the malodorous Owen McCune return to help solve the case in this second Miranda Abbott mystery.

About Ian Ferguson

Ian Ferguson won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour for Village of the Small Houses and is the co-author, with his brother, Will, of How to Be a Canadian, which was shortlisted for the Leacock Medal ad won the CBA Libris Award for non-fiction. A writer and creative director in the film and television industry, Ian Ferguson lives in Victoria.

About Will Ferguson

Will Ferguson is a three-time winner of the Leacock Medal for Humour. His novels include his debut, HappinessTM, which sold in 23 languages; 419, which won the Scotiabank Giller Prize; and The Finder, which won the 2021 Arthur Ellis Award for Crime Fiction. With his brother, Ian, he is the co-author of the mega-bestseller How to Be a Canadian. Will Ferguson lives in Calgary.

About A Meditation on Murder

Helen Thorpe returns to help a wannabe influencer get her life in order – and solve the murders of her fellow content creators – in this hilarious sequel to Mindful of Murder by bestselling author Susan Juby 

When Buddhist butler Helen Thorpe is loaned out to help Cartier Hightower get her life in order, she finds herself working for a young woman entirely unbound by the fetters of good taste or sound judgment. One of Cartier’s fellow content creators has recently died in a strange accident. Soon after Helen arrives, another is killed in an equally bizarre way. Cartier begins to drag Helen around on the influencer circuit, where neither of them is particularly welcome. Then comes the terrible incident at the EDM nightclub that turns Cartier into a global pariah, at least according to social media.

Helen hopes a period of simplicity and reflection and an internet detox will help Cartier find her true nature and maybe acquire some social graces. But Helen’s job gets much harder when Cartier’s friends show up at the lavish ranch where Cartier and Helen have retreated. Soon, Helen finds herself trying to avoid becoming Instafamous while bringing some peace to a girl who very much needs it. This task turns out to be even more impossible when it becomes clear that they have been followed to Weeping Creek Ranch by a murderer. 

About Susan Juby

SUSAN JUBY is the award-winning, bestselling author of Mindful of Murder, which debuted at No. 1 on the independent bookstores’ bestseller list and was nominated for the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour. She has also written Getting the Girl, Another Kind of Cowboy, and The Woefield Poultry Collective, as well as the bestselling Alice series (Alice, I Think; Miss Smithers; and Alice MacLeod, Realist at Last). Her novel Republic of Dirt won the Stephen Leacock Medal in 2016. Susan Juby lives on Vancouver Island with her husband, James, and their dogs, who are convinced they could have lucrative careers as social media stars.

About Host Shelley Youngblut

Shelley Youngblut is the CEO & Creative Ringleader of Wordfest. She was the recipient of the 2020 Calgary Award for Community Achievement in the Arts and the 2018 Rozsa Award for Arts Leadership. She also won the 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award at the Western Magazine Awards. Youngblut was the founding editor of Calgary’s award-winning Swerve magazine and has created magazines for ESPN, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, Nickelodeon, Western Living, and The Globe and Mail. She was also a former pop-culture correspondent for ABC World News Now and Canada AM. Follow her on Facebook @ShelleyYoungblut and Instagram/Threads @youngblutshelley.

Be Curiouser:

• Murder, They Joked: Brothers Will and Ian Ferguson have fun with the genre in I Only Read Murder. –The Calgary Herald
• Review of I Only Read Murder. –CrimeFictionLover.com
• Susan Juby's Mindful of Murder is a Murder Mystery Full of Humour and Compassion. –The Next Chapter 
• Red Fern Podcast with Susan Juby. –Red Fern Podcast
• Mom Jeans. –Susan Juby