High Arrow the novel
History. Fiction. Mystery.
In the 1960s, more than 2000 Arrow Lakes residents were displaced prior to flooding caused by Hugh Keenleyside Dam. In High Arrow, a fast-paced murder mystery, that history comes alive.
Excerpt from
High Arrow
“We’ll get — what you call — compensation, non?” Gaston asked. “Rebuild on higher ground?”
But Jake’s mind had already turned to his mother. She would never leave that damn house. The house that held the last traces of her husband and daughter: his caps and coats still hanging in the back closet; her paintings on the walls, sunlight bleaching the wallpaper around them. He had tried to recentre one of Clara’s paintings once only to find the wallpaper behind it — untouched by the sun — had retained its darker hues, the strong colour that used to spread evenly across the walls.
Researching High Arrow
I set out to write a novel steeped in the true realities and everyday life of the 1960s Arrow Lakes.
It was a time of great upheaval and change, when industrial progress was largely idealized and Canada’s great natural resources dwarfed its small population.
A cold case. A ticking clock. A conspiracy far greater than imagined.
In this historical fiction mystery set in the 1960s Arrow Lakes of British Columbia, Jake O’Reilly, 22, lives with his mother, an alcoholic ravaged by grief after the deaths of her husband from illness and her daughter from a hit-and-run. They live a quiet life on the lake, Jake working on a tugboat as a marine logger. Still reeling from his sister’s untimely death, Jake has turned inward, keeping other people at a distance.
When he learns the news that the government has approved a storage dam that will flood his community and many others in his valley, he realizes this is the last chance to solve his sister’s hit-and-run, before witnesses are dispersed, possible evidence destroyed, and the crime scene itself – a road near the water – levelled and flooded.
After being let down by the local RCMP, he decides to pursue the case himself, aided by a cast of secondary characters including an unconventional Circus-trained preacher with an eye to the Minto sternwheeler, a beguiling young immigrant reporter, and a convict willing to make a deal, whose information changes the whole investigation: his sister’s hit-and-run points to a far bigger conspiracy.
Jake must overcome his fear of connection and trust his new friends to help him solve the case. But in an increasingly destabilized world based on true historical events where houses are burning, neighbours are pitted against one another, and his own home is below the new high water line, he wonders who can he trust and if it will end up hurting those he has come to care about – just as he was unable to protect his sister.
Themes & categories
| Marine Logging | Displacement | Canadian sovereignty |
| Cold Cases | Ecological disturbance | British Columbia history |
| Rural alienation | The 1960s | Columbia River Treaty |
| Agricultural land loss | Justice | Resettlement |
| Hydroelectric dams | Expropriation | Arrow Lakes history |
| LGBTQ2 history | BC Hydro | Forestry |