Silver Totem of Shame: A Meg Harris Mystery

by R.J. Harlick

Overview

On Haida Gwaii, Meg unravels a story of betrayal that reaches back more than a century.

While visiting Vancouver, Meg Harris encounters the crime scene of a murdered Haida carver. She and her husband Eric are forced to confront Eric’s painful past when the young victim’s identity is discovered. The repercussions send them up the coast to the islands of Haida Gwaii, land of the Haida, in search of the murdered boy’s family and his killer. As the search progresses, a totem pole carver sets out to depict the ancient tale of a long-ago chief’s treasure and how it incited deception and shame. This tragedy reaches its nasty tentacles into the present where Meg and Eric find themselves embroiled in a modern-day story of betrayal.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781459721692
Publisher:	Dundurn Press
Publication date:	05/20/2014
Series:	A Meg Harris Mystery , #6
Pages:	376
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.80(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

R.J. Harlick's love for Canada's untamed wilds is the inspiration for the six-book Meg Harris series. The fourth in the series, Arctic Blue Death, was shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Award for best crime novel. She lives in Ottawa.

Editorial Reviews

06/09/2014
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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

This is the best Harlick yet.

Globe and Mail

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.

Booklist

By showing both sides of the Indian-versus-European cultural dispute, [Harlick] wisely avoids the trap of painting one side’s history as pure evil, the other’s as sinless. This even-handedness brings complexity and depth to what could have been a mere diatribe. Instead, we get a superb novel that lends itself to reread after reread.

Mystery Scene Magazine

It wasn’t long ago that I paid a visit to British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. There on display, are the ‘Totems of Shame’, long ago removed from their original villages. It was with a shudder of recognition that I joined [characters] Meg and Eric for a much-remembered tour of the red cedar carvings of the coast.

Sun Times

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.

Booklist

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.

By showing both sides of the Indian-versus-European cultural dispute, [Harlick] wisely avoids the trap of painting one side’s history as pure evil, the other’s as sinless. This even-handedness brings complexity and depth to what could have been a mere diatribe. Instead, we get a superb novel that lends itself to reread after reread.

This is the best Harlick yet.

It wasn’t long ago that I paid a visit to British Columbia’s Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver. There on display, are the ‘Totems of Shame’, long ago removed from their original villages. It was with a shudder of recognition that I joined [characters] Meg and Eric for a much-remembered tour of the red cedar carvings of the coast.

Harlick’s prose and characterization is as competent as ever and the slow reveal of the reasons why Allistair was murdered is skillfully handled.

From the Publisher