A Cold White Fear

November 2, 2015
In the seventh book in Harlick’s Meg Harris series, Meg is alone with 12-year-old Adjidamo, aka Jid, an Algonquin boy she befriended in an earlier book who is currently staying with her, and puppy Shoni in her remote cottage in western Quebec while her Algonquin husband, Eric, is in Regina (Meg herself is white). In the midst of a blizzard, her Christmas preparations are interrupted by the arrival of two men. One is badly injured and says he knows her late great-aunt, so reluctantly, she lets them in. Her skepticism about their car accident turns to terror when she discovers that they are escaped convicts: the first, a white man known as the Professor, is covered with snake tattoos, and the second, Larry, is a diminutive Algonquin man. Meg’s attempt to send Jid to get help is thwarted when he is stopped and brought back to the cottage by a psychopathic third member of the gang, Slobo, on his way to meet the others. Forced to feed and attend to the men, Meg is sure they will not leave her and Jid alive. Harlick (Arctic Blue Death) skillfully builds tension, as Meg and Jid attempt to escape, and dread about what will happen when the snowstorm abates and the last gang member arrives. The author respectfully crosses intercultural boundaries in the story and portrays fully formed Algonquin characters alongside their non-Algonquin counterparts.

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.