Found: Adult thriller about a writer in Canada who gets caught up in preventing a crime to protect his friends and neighbors

I read this within the last 5 years or so. Here's what I remember:
- The protagonist was a nebbishy writer (I think), who had his niece or goddaughter over for the weekend.
- The girl was very smart and was always writing or drawing (?), maybe in a notebook?
- They had a cat who would turn up in other apartments in the house they lived in.
- The neighbors were eccentric, and some turned out to be retired spies.
- Someone drove up from the U.S. to steal something or harm one of the neighbors.
- The girl noticed this person, maybe at the diner she liked to go to.
- There was a vintage car involved.
- At some point, the girl was kidnapped by the thief/killer because she was getting in his way.
- The protagonist has to step up and save everyone, even though he is not that kind of guy.
- There was a neighbor who was an artist or a new age-y person, and there may have been some relationship developing with the protagonist. She may have been Asian.
- The author was male, and this may have been his first book.

I would love to find this again, and to see if the series continued.

Thank you.

I found it: Windfall, by Byron TD Smith. A lot of what I remembered wasn't so accurate, but that's the one.

Touchstone: Windfall