June 9, 2014
Allistair, a promising young Haida carver is brutally murdered in his Vancouver studio; in the aftermath the pole Allistair was working on vanishes. Meg Harris' discovery that the dead man is the adopted son of Meg's husband Eric's estranged stepsister Chloe, draws her into into the troubled world of British Columbia's Haida. Solving the mystery of who murdered Allistair requires solving the mystery of who his birth family was, knowledge Allistair was denied. The trail leads to a remote island and a community torn apart by greed and ambition, violence and tragedy, dark secrets and terrible betrayal. This is the sixth novel in the Meg Harris series, whose fourth entry was a nominee for the Arthur Ellis Award; each book looks at a different First Nations community. Harlick's prose and characterization is as competent as ever and the slow reveal of the reasons why Allistair was murdered is skillfully handled. That said, just as Meg, the white protagonist as detective-tourist in First Nations communities, seems more bystander than detective, so this work and the series as a whole has overtones of concerned liberal voyeurism at the plight of Canada's natives.
May 1, 2014
Amateur sleuth Meg Harris and her new husband, Eric, are on a working vacation in Vancouver, B.C., where Eric is attending an assembly of the Grand Council of First Nations. A museum tour is cut short when the guide learns that her boyfriend has been murdered. In the kind of coincidence that a lot of writers might not get away with, it turns out that the victim's mother is Eric's long-estranged stepsister. Meg wants to reach out to the grieving woman, but Eric wants no part of it. Meg insists, and soon she and Eric have determined to find out what happened to the dead man. In this sixth in the series, Harlick again uses a contemporary mystery to launch an exploration of Canada's aboriginal peoples and their history and customs. Meg is a good series lead, a likable woman with some flawsher alcoholism and her reticence when it comes to forming personal relationshipsthat give her emotional depth. Fans of the earlier books in the series will give this one an enthusiastic thumbs-up, and it will work fine as a jumping-off point for new readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)