Sleeping Island

Account of journeys west of Hudson Bay in summer of 1939 to Nueltin Lake.

In this new mystery series set on the islands off the coast of British Columbia and Washington State, Noel Franklin and Kyra Rachel team up to form Islands Investigations International. Quickly they come to realize that some crimes respect no boundaries. Their first job takes Noel and Kyra to Gabriola Island and the unsolved murder of an art gallery groundskeeper. The vicious rumours surrounding the case take several sinister turns, leading them into grave personal danger. As each investigator falls prey to those they need to trust, Kyra and Noel discover that even charming island communities can keep deadly secrets.

In an age when bush planes and outboard motors were opening up previously inaccessible regions of the Canadian North, Prentice G. Downes, a graduate of Harvard who worked as a schoolteacher just outside Boston, chose to travel alone by canoe to explore the Great Barren Lands. Sleeping Island is the sensitively written and moving account of one of his trips, a journey made in 1939 to remote, and at that time unmapped, Nueltin Lake. In Sleeping Island, Downes records a North that was soon to be no more, a landscape and a people barely touched by white men. Downes describes the excitement of wilderness canoe travel, the delights of discovering the land, and his deep feeling for people met along the way. His respect for the Indians and the Inuit and their ways of life, and his love of their land, shine through this richly descriptive work.

Updated and revised, Sleeping Bear: Yesterday and Today has everything you need to know about this spectacular national park in northwestern Michigan-practically from the formation of the planet to the present, with some ruminations about the future of the great dunes. Using over 250 illustrations and photographs, the author presents regional folklore, prehistory, and history of this beautiful area. The volume provides insight into the native peoples who inhabited the region before the Europeans, to the European explorers and the white settlements that followed. Sleeping Bear: Yesterday and Today is a fascinating account of the land of the dunes and the people who've lived there, wrapped in an often-gripping story. Originally published in 1990.