Welcome!

When I set out to write the Meg Harris mystery series, I wanted to make the setting an integral part of the story, much the way John D. MacDonald did in his Travis McGee series. I chose a setting I know and love well, the endless forests of West Quebec that stretch northward from the shores of the Ottawa River to those of James Bay.

Like most readers of mysteries, I love nothing better than to become engrossed in a good fast-paced mystery, one that keeps me guessing right up 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.

But I wanted a series character that did more than solve murders. I wanted someone whom readers could relate to: someone who faced the same obstacles we all do in our daily lives and didn’t always deal with them effectively.

Thus Meg Harris was born. An escapee from the urban turmoil of Toronto and a failed marriage, Meg drinks a little too much and is afraid of the dark, yet she lives alone at Three Deer Point, the isolated Victorian cottage she inherited from her Great-aunt Agatha. Her only companion is Sergei, a giant poodle. She lives a hundred miles from nowhere with the Migiskan Algonquin Indian Reserve her only neighbour. But, despite her desire to retreat, Meg is unable 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 mystery series, I hope to blow away a corner of the cloud and introduce the reader to both the challenges facing today’s First Nations people and the ancient customs that help to root them to the land the Creator gave in their care.

And so the Fishhook Algonquin Indian Band came into being, or Migiskan Anishinabeg as they prefer to call themselves. Although this band is a product of my imagination I have attempted, with help from members of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, to bring alive in the Meg Harris series the culture of the Algonquins that inhabit the forests of West Quebec.

R.J. Harlick