HIGH ARROW

A preacher with an eye to the Minto sternwheeler. A sickly caretaker of a crumbling estate. A girl with strange intuition. A beguiling immigrant reporter. Who can Jake trust? And can he trust himself?

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 lower Arrow Lake, Jake working on a tugboat as a marine logger. Still reeling from his sister’s untimely death, Jake has turned inward, cutting himself off from most people around him.

When Jake learns the government has approved a storage dam that will flood his community and many others in his valley, he knows 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.

In an increasingly destabilized world based on true historical events where houses are burning, neighbours are pitted against one another, and his own family’s home is below the high water line, he wonders who he can trust and if it will end up hurting those he has come to care about – just as he was unable to protect his sister.