Notable for the Quin and Morgan novels that he began after teaching for many years at the University of Ottawa, he has lectured on Canadian literature in Europe, the United States, Japan, Greenland, and the Canary Islands.
He grew up in the village of Blair until age eleven when the family left Waterloo County where their roots go back to its earliest settlement in 1802.
Among his most influential books are Patterns of Isolation (1974), A Reader's Guide to the Canadian Novel (1981; rpt 1987), Enduring Dreams (1994), The Paradox of Meaning (1999), and Being Fiction (2001).
Between 1973 and the present Moss has contributed to the crucial transformations that have occurred in the history of our critical thought.The stories are set in Toronto, early in the new millennium.
After ten years working in Homicide together, detectives Miranda Quin and David Morgan are a virtual couple who could not possibly live together, yet are incomplete being apart.