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Local author Angela van Breemen prepares for release of second book in mystery series

September 18, 2025   ·   0 Comments

By Joshua Drakes

Fans of crime literature and the paranormal will have a new book to sink their teeth into in November, as “Revenge is Not Enough,” the second installment in the David Harris and Emma Jackson Mystery series, will be hitting the shelves.

Penned by Angela van Breemen – an Orangeville native – the story will pick up right where “Past Life’s Revenge” left off, as Emma and David are back on a new case.

Her first novel, “Past Life’s Revenge,” not only attracted a loyal readership but also earned recognition on the awards circuit. The book won a Bronze Medal in the 2025 Global Book Awards in the Fiction – Action Adventure category, and also received third place in the Bookfest Awards for Fiction – Mystery – Supernatural.

She is also an accomplished vocalist and published her first album, “In the Breeze,” last year before releasing “Past Life’s Revenge.”

“In Book Two, Emma experiences a terrifying nightmare where she sees a young girl, maybe around 16 years old, blonde hair, running in a forest, and she’s being chased,” van Breeman said. “This particular vision really took quite a toll on Emma, so then there’s concern in the family about her being a young psychic, and her powers are still developing.”

The young girl in this vision is Maggie, and she is an extremely powerful spirit who imposes upon Emma during a seance and desperately requests that they find her babies and save them.

This causes confusion in the group, as Maggie was so young when she disappeared.

“It’s been 20 years since she disappeared, how on earth could she have had children?” van Breeman said, teasing a twist. “But it turns out that she didn’t die right away, and she did have children.”

The mystery reveals a dark secret. This disappearance, and others like it, are not accidents. There are evil groups at work behind the scenes.

“I don’t want to give up too much of the story, but it does involve a situation where women, young women, are being kidnapped and they are being forced to have babies at the behest of the very rich,” she said.

No one has been able to find these women or the children, because it was all done behind the shadows.

“There’s no record of these women because they’ve disappeared,” van Breeman said. “There’s no record of these babies as well, so no one knows this is happening.”

This time, the story will take readers beyond the town to the mountains of Nicaragua, all the while a sinister group, the Dark Hands of Anubis, continues their work. Will our protagonists be able to expose and stop this evil? You’ll only find out by reading to the end.

The Dark Hands of Anubis are returning villains from the first book. They were involved in the kidnapping of children, targeting the best and brightest they could find, and inducting them and training them to be dangerous and highly skilled assassins for hire.

Van Breeman said that this book will continue the balance between the physical and paranormal. An important focus of this series is to show how these plots require both the physical and metaphysical elements to work together to resolve the cases.

A psychic could communicate with a spirit, but that’s far from enough to prove anything legally, so they work with police and investigative teams to guide them to evidence to use against the antagonists.

“I have to bring in the real world,” she said. “Because it’s not good enough for psychics to say ‘he did it or she did it’, or ‘I saw it in a vision.’ I mean, that’s ridiculous, right? I’m always keeping in mind that the help of the police is needed, so perhaps there’s a clue or a direction that the psychic sees that then enables the police to find solid evidence,”

“There’s going to be a nice blend of using the paranormal, but at the same time staying firmly planted in the reality of solid police work,” van Breeman added.

This co-dependence will interest both crime readers and supernatural readers, as the physical world and metaphysical will work together, rather than in competition, to right wrongs and uncover the truth.

With “Revenge is Not Enough,” van Breemen continues to expand the world she has created, raising the stakes for her characters while deepening the series’ balance of the seen and unseen. Readers looking for a mystery that combines thrills, suspense, and the paranormal will find much to enjoy when the book arrives on Nov. 4.  

The book will be available on Amazon (Kindle and soft cover formats), Indigo stores, and IngramSpark.

More information about the book can be found online on van Breeman’s website: https://angelavanbreemen.ca.

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