The Confessions of Joseph Blanchard is a contemporary story of obsessive love, sexual transgression and tragic loss. Bachelor and professional accountant Joseph Blanchard has led a socially active though emotionally cautious life into his late thirties. When he discovers that his beautiful nineteen-year-old cousin Sophie, a talented concert pianist, is in love with him, he finds he is helpless to resist her youthful charms, and against his better judgment embarks upon a passionate affair. As a safeguard against causing pain to her parents, the two lovers conspire to keep their relationship secret. For a while they are happy. But Sophie’s performing career compels her to spend time in the company of other musicians, many of them young men. Consumed by jealousy, Joseph allows rage to seize control, with tragic results. Grieving, he sets about to destroy all evidence of the affair. But when a family secret is exposed, it reveals the past in a new light. In the end, his health in decline and with nothing left but memories, he discloses his secret to a confidant.

Ian Colford is a fiction writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His stories, reviews, and commentary have appeared in Canadian literary publications from coast to coast and in journals published online. From 1995 to 1998 he was editor of the literary journal Pottersfield Portfolio, and from 1994 to 2000 served on the executive board of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia. In 1998 he selected and edited a collection of stories by Maritime writers called Water Studies. Written over eight years, The Crimes of Hector Tomás was completed in 2010 with the help of two Canada Council grants and residencies at the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers and Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Evidence, his first collection of short fiction, was published in 2008 by Porcupine’s Quill.

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Truly an original: a tangle of a story, perfectly executed, and completely captivating.

Carrie Stanton, The Miramichi Reader