Saved from certain death on the Whistler-Vancouver highway after his luxury car malfunctions, Mark Morata feels honour-bound to reward his rescuer, Geoff Pybus, with a token of his undying gratitude. Geoff, a frustratingly humble university professor, happy with his family's lot in life, only wants the impossible: for his modest, straightforward wife to get tenure at her university.

Luckily, Mark is a man for whom impossible is just another word. As a sophisticated importer-exporter of certain recreational substances ("drug lord" is such a cliché), Mark gets to work on the academic world with the same relentless nature that helped him climb to the top of the cartel. However, the hallowed campus halls reveal an environment that is vicious and corrupt beyond anything he has ever encountered in the drug business...

Kieran Egan was born in Clonmel, Tipperary, Ireland, and educated in England, receiving a BA in history. He then went to California to work with IBM Corp. as a consultant while beginning a PhD at Stanford University, which he completed at Cornell University in 1972. His first academic job was at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia, where he remained till his recent retirement. His academic work dealt with innovative educational theory and detailed practical methods whereby implications of the theory can be applied in everyday classrooms. He focused on the nature and development of imagination, and argued for its centrality in learning and the construction of meaning. There have been about forty translations of his books into around twenty languages. He and his wife have three children and five grandchildren --all, of course, wonderful, and all the children produce books of various kinds. During his academic life he gave talks in most European countries, and throughout Asia, South America, and Australasia. He also writes poetry and has published in many Canadian, British, Irish, and USA magazines. His first poetry book, Amplified Silence, was published by Silver Bow Publishing in 2021, and his second, Seven Oaks Ago, from the same publisher appeared in 2022. He has an interest in Japanese-style gardens, and built one at the rear of his house, which resulted in a book, Building My Zen Garden, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), and also a TV program in the Recreating Eden series. He was an athlete when younger--quite good at long-jump and triple-jump--but after four operations, he now has metal screws in his knees. He lives in Vancouver, BC. Tenure, was published by NeWest Press in 2021.

Kieran Egan's profile page

Praise for Tenure:
"With the Japanese yakuza wanting a piece of his action and the Vietnamese gangs breathing down his neck, drug lord Mark Morata has his hands full. But when he decides to make an 'offer they can't refuse' to the members of a university faculty, he doesn't know what he is in for. Filled with delightfully quirky characters, Tenure is an entertaining romp that pits organized crime against the disorganized mob of the academic world."
~ Norm Boucher, author of Horseplay: My Time Undercover on the Granville Strip
"An inspired mash-up of academia and the underworld which opens with a Hitchcockian-style hook that grabs the reader and doesn't let go. Tenure establishes Egan as an exciting and distinct new voice in Canadian crime fiction."
~ A.J. Devlin, award-winning author of Cobra Clutch and Rolling Thunder