Welcome!

When I set out to write the Meg Harris mystery series, I wanted to make the setting an integral part of the story. I chose a setting I know and love well, the endless forests and waterways of West Quebec that stretch northward from the Ottawa River to the shores of James Bay.

By the time it came to writing my fourth book, Arctic Blue Death, I thought it time to travel, so I sent Meg to the treeless tundra of Baffin Island in Canada's far north, a place I had always wanted to visit myself. With the success of this book, I decided that while Meg's home will remain in West Quebec, she will on occasion travel to other equally magnificent wildernesses in Canada and visit with the First People that inhabit these wild and mysterious lands.

Like most readers of mysteries, I love nothing better than to become engrossed in a good fast-paced mystery, one that keeps me guessing until the very end. So I have endeavoured to create action-packed plots with enough twists and turns to keep the ending a complete surprise. In fact, these twists and turns often keep even me, the writer, in suspense.

I wanted a series character that did more than solve murders. I wanted someone to whom readers could relate; someone who faced the same obstacles we all do in our daily lives, and someone who would grow and change as we all do with the passage of time.

Thus Meg Harris was born. An escapee from the urban turmoil of Toronto and a failed marriage, Meg drinks a little too much, tends to leap before she thinks and is afraid of the dark, yet she lives at Three Deer Point, the isolated Victorian cottage she inherited from her Great-aunt Agatha. She lives a hundred miles from nowhere with the Migiskan Algonquin First Nations Reserve her closest neighbour. Despite her desire to retreat, Meg is unable to turn away when injustice strikes. She has to face it head on and do what she can to make it right.

I have long felt that the first inhabitants of our great northern land are a forgotten people, with many of their traditional ways lost in the mushroom cloud of modern culture. With the Meg Harris series, I hope to blow away a corner of this cloud and introduce the reader to the challenges facing today's First Nations people and the ancient customs that root them to the land the Creator gave in their care.

R.J. Harlick