Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson is a writer living in Toronto. He writes a wide variety of crime and crime-adjacent fiction, including novels, novellas, stories, and flash fiction. He is the past winner of the Black Orchid Novella Award (2021) and the Crime Writers of Canada Best Novella Award (2023) for “The Man Who Went Down Under.” He placed third in the Toronto Star’s Short Story Contest (2022) for “The Unfinished Book.”
In June 2024 his first novel The Road to Heaven was published by Dundurn Press. The Road to Heaven is a noir mystery introducing artless young detective Patrick Bird, set in Toronto’s Parkdale and High Park during the tumultuous ’60s.
Alexis has sold the sequel to The Road to Heaven to Dundurn Press with a release date of March 2026.
Represented by Julia Kim at The Rights Factory.
The Road to Heaven
A gripping noir mystery introducing artless young detective Patrick Bird, set in Toronto’s Parkdale during the tumultuous ’60s.
“I didn’t kill her. I had the thought, the idea. What’s the saying? The road to heaven is paved with bad intentions?”
Police academy burnout turned private eye Patrick Bird works divorce cases, using his camera to catch the unfaithful and the lonely looking for love in rented rooms. But his easy routine is shattered by a new case involving a missing girl.
Sixteen-year-old Abbie Linklater hasn’t been home for three days. Her mother believes Abbie’s getting an abortion. Her twin brother thinks she’s studying at the library. Her best friend couldn’t care less. Her father has no idea; he just wants her home without involving the police.
Before the sun sets on the first day of his investigation, as Bird roams the streets of Toronto looking for the runaway, he’s caught a drifter prowling in the Linklater’s backyard, stumbled into a creepy church with a belligerent minister, sparred with the client, been hit by a car, and discovered some loose ends in a bank robbery gone wrong a decade earlier.
And that was before he found the body.
Short Fiction
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How cold the air was, and how I fought to stay warm in those first minutes. I don’t think I’ve ever forgiven the world for that. And that’s a part of my success.
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When his father took him camping for the first time, the boy was excited about what animals he might see in the wild. Imagine his excitement when he saw a moose -- which even his father, in all his years of experience -- had never seen.
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Marcy thought the house her ex-husband grew up in looked haunted. He never thought of it that way, but when he returns to tidy up after his father’s death he finds himself thinking maybe she was right after all.
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Not all private detectives live at home with their mother, but it’s lucky for Dalton Duckworth, head of the Duckworth Detective Agency, that he does because she’s the brains of the organization. When they’re not trading insults or eating breakfast the two team up to search for the Sun of Sumatra, the massive diamond in Joy Cleaver’s missing aigrette.
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Amy knows she shouldn’t open the door to the stranger on her stoop, but she does anyway. Peter is writing a book about Toronto’s famous bank robbers, The Boyd Gang, and she lives in the house that they hid out at after escaping the Don Jail. A key piece of Peter’s research lies right under her living room floor.
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Extra:
Appointment at Gunn Lake
In the chaotic days before the pandemic even had a name, Ralph and his wife Farrah leave the panic of Vancouver for their cabin at Gunn Lake. Ralph has a premonition that death is stalking him and he will catch the virus—that’s why he’s so happy to escape to the peace of their lake home.
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What I’m Reading
