The River Runs Orange - A Meg Harris Mystery

A young Qubcoise sneaks off to meet her Algonquin lover in an isolated hunting camp on the Migiskan Reserve. Five days later, Meg Harris discovers her frozen and brutalized body. The young Native is charged with her murder, and Meg feels responsible, since the young woman was a member of a crew which was helping her to clear some ski trails. Meanwhile both Meg and her friend, band chief Eric, are faced with another disaster. Someone is supplying the band's children with drugs. Are the events connected? Meg, convinced of the innocence of the young man in the death of his lover, sets out to find the real killer against a backdrop of police prejudice.

In the remote wilderness of West Quebec, where trees outnumber people a million to one and lakes a thousand to one, Death's Golden Whisper opens with the sudden arrival of float planes bringing what Meg Harris believes are fishermen to the isolated northern lake she lives on. Within hours, she discovers that these men have come to develop a gold mine. She combines forces with Eric Odjik, chief of the neighbouring Migiskan reserve, to fight the mining company. The mine splits the Migiskan band into two opposing forces and ignites events that threaten Meg and lead to the mysterious disappearance of her friend Marie. As the search for Marie becomes more frustrating, another story unfolds and Meg discovers the mystery behind the intense feelings that bound her great-aunt to this lonely land until the day she died.

The sparsely populated Arctic is no stranger to murder. The fourth in the Meg Harris series follows Meg's adventures into the Candian Arctic as she searches for the truth about the disappearance of her father when she was a child. Many years ago, her father's plane had gone missing in the Arctic and he was never seen again. What happened on that fateful flight? Thirty-six years later, her mother receives some strange Inuit drawings that suggest he might have survived. Intent on discovering the answers, no matter how painful, Meg travels to Iqaluit to find the artist and is sucked into the world of Inuit art forgery. Arctic Blue Death is not only a journey into Meg's past and the events that helped shape the person she is today, but it's also a journey into the land of the Inuit and the culture that has sustained them for thousands of years. Finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel.

Meg Harris, an amateur sleuth who drinks a little too much and is afraid of the dark, returns to her home in the West Quebec wilderness after a trip. Upon her arrival she discovers that a friend's daughter has been missing from the Migiskan Reserve for more than two months. Meg vows to help find the missing girl and starts by confronting the police on their indifference to the disappearance. During her investigation, Meg discovers that more than one Native woman has gone missing. Fearing the worst, Meg delves deeper and finds herself confronting an underside of life she would rather not know existed.

This is the fifth installment in the acclaimed Meg Harris series. Arctic Blue Death, the previous title, was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel. The other Meg Harris novels are The River Runs Orange, Red Ice for a Shroud, and Death's Golden Whisper.