The only transgender woman author of queer psychological crime thrillers in Canada.
(for now)
– DEBUT NOVEL –
The profiler’s shadow
A queer, psychological crime thriller.
Paperback coming November 3rd, 2026, through DarkWinter Press
Pre-order your Kindle version now!
http://a-fwd.com/asin=B0HPBWGH38
A New Heroine in a New World
Debut novels are like the spring rains of genre fiction, bringing new voices and new life to each field every year. This is especially true in crime fiction with its generations of master authors, complex plots, and charismatic heroes and heroines.
Joelle Circe’s debut novel, The Profiler’s Shadow, is just such a work, combining genre standards such as a twisting plot and a powerful, lurking villain with a very complicated heroine and a unique voice.
All storytelling is about conflict, and Mary Dubois, the heroine of The Profiler’s Shadow, comes with an engaging assortment of conflicts: anxiety disorder, hypersensitivity, and self-doubt, among other things. She’s also a transgender woman dealing with bigoted authority figures and searching for a romantic fit in her life. And she has a murderous villain who wants to personally lock wits with her. Conflict doesn’t come any richer than this, and author Circe treats us to a plot that twists and turns with every chapter as these conflicts play out.
Beneath all that is the author’s voice—not just the voice of Mary Dubois, who narrates the story, but also the storyteller’s voice. The stories we tell are dictated in large part by the lives we lead, the experiences we have, and the words and phrases we use to express what we see and feel.
Joelle Circe is a very original voice in this context: she’s a bilingual French-Canadian whose sentence structures and expressions are more complex than authors who write in English alone.
She’s transgender and experiences the world as a more challenging place than the average cisgender person. And her setting is contemporary Montreal and its surrounding environs--a magnificent cityscape and a rich natural habitat that are seldom explored in North American fiction and pleasingly brought to life by Ms. Circe.
The Profiler’s Shadow is a fun read, and its many complexities deliver a rich, textured reading experience of unusual depth.
Renee James
author of BeatNikki’s Café, Seven Suspects, A Kind of Justice, Coming Out Can Be Murder.
Mary Dubois’s quiet life as a writer shatters when the Sûreté du Québec arrives at her door. A killer is staging gruesome tableaux in the Québec wilderness, and he’s left a message: he will only communicate with Mary. Mary, a former profiler, must leave her hard-won seclusion to hunt a monster who seems to know her every move and weakness.
Reunited with her ex-lover, Officer Teresa Cook, and confronting the open hostility of her old tormentors in the police force. Mary finds herself drawn deeper into a web of psychological warfare. The killer’s notes are not just clues, they are invitations into a shared, violent history she never knew she had. To stop the slaughter, Mary will have to turn her terrifying insight inwards to her own bloodline—before she becomes his final masterpiece…
