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The Word On The Street has been renowned for the quality and diversity of its event programming and our 2026 festival promises to offer the best so far. Check out our schedule for Saturday, September 19, 2026!
The cocktails: strong.
The hookups: messy.
The corpse: a real buzzkill.
Private investigator Verona Montero hikes fifteen kilometers to a cliff-top lodge in the Canadian Badlands to dodge cheating dirtbags and a crush with better abs than boundaries. She expects R&R. Instead, a sex-bomb named Harper turns up planted in the front garden—daisies and all—and a storm turns the only road out into a mud smoothie. With the cops days away, Verona gets promoted to PI-in-residence with a complimentary bar tab and a house full of alibis that smell like last night’s tequila.
The lodge is an adult summer camp for bad decisions: late-night room changes, motives with teeth, and alibis flimsier than a motel towel. When the body count starts flirting with plural, Verona’s strategy is simple—ruin evenings, crack egos, and make the killer sweat through their resort wear. Otherwise her weekend getaway could turn into a permanent check-out.
Kayleigh Suggett writes the kind of mysteries she couldn’t find on the shelf: the ones where the detective is a “private dick” (mostly because she likes the pun), the humor is unapologetically crass, and the plot moves faster than a billionaire fleeing a crime scene.
Inspired by the subversive, absurdist wit of authors like Christopher Moore, Kayleigh created Verona Montero to fill the gap between “polite” mysteries and gritty noir. Having spent years in customer service, she’s seen the absolute weirdest of human behaviour—and she’s putting it all on the page, unfiltered and with a perfectly snide simile for every occasion.
When she isn’t documenting “crotch headaches” or chasing killers through the rainy pubs of Ireland, Kayleigh is a wedding singer, a choir nerd, and a frustrated solver of NYT crosswords. She lives in Calgary, AB, with her husband and son, where she remains a proud member of the Crime Writers of Canada and a firm believer that most situations simply require a F*ck It smoothie.
