Looking forward to meeting readers and reconnecting with local authors. We have a strong, talented group here in the Tri-Cities, Fraser Valley, and it’s been a while since I’ve ventured out into the world.
Vancouver Witches Beware The Hunter: Hexborn, JP McLean
The “Mistress of Complications” returns with a meticulously plotted urban fantasy/supernatural thriller. Its hallmark, an intricate web of magical systems and relationships in a well-developed fantastical world. Yet at its heart, it’s about people we care about, how they live, love, and survive the forces of evil who would see them destroyed.
In this sequel to The Never Witch, JP McLean offers an ingenious illustration of the dangers of xenophobia. Two interwoven subplots converge at the climax in an epic battle to destroy a near-unstoppable assassin whose goal is to annihilate the Hexborn. That’s what this group of young soldiers call themselves. Others call them cursed. They are mixed blood, carrying the DNA of both witches and warlocks and persecuted by both, who fear their power. The Hexborn work like an intelligence team. They are the hunted hunting the hunter—their mission to execute this “killing machine.”
Meanwhile, in Vancouver, the sparks between Adeline (a magically barren witch carrying warlock magic) and Luke (a sexy warlock determined to teach her how to control her magic while winning her heart) explode into a fiery romance. The couple can now communicate telepathically and spend hours at his nature sanctuary where Adeline learns to draw her power from trees and hold it in check as Luke tests her. Adeline and Luke are two of the narrators. The third is Mia.
One of the leaders of the Hexborn, Mia is tasked with protecting Alice, a twelve-year-old telepath tied to the hunter’s signet ring. Alice leads the group across Canada as they pursue this monster who’s murdering innocent families. Adeline can not only hear Luke, she can hear Alice, and this is how the two entities converge to join forces against the hunter.
McLean transforms Vancouver into a magical underworld reminiscent of the Harry Potter stories. Gastown’s Arcane Alley “oozed a quiet menace aimed at non-magicals. Anyone who resisted their influence would find themselves in an empty alley with an overwhelming compulsion to leave.” Arcane Alley is where witches and warlocks go to buy supplies but here also “stolen artifacts, questionable potions, and magical tools of the trade—many fake—change hands.”
Adeline and her witchy sister, Sarah, are combing through archives at The Sanctuary, researching magically barren witches and telepathy as Adeline’s health declines. Having mixed magic is a dangerous and relatively unknown proposition. Could it kill her? Perhaps. The stakes are high.
Yet, there are moments to sink into the lushness of nature, the excitement of love, the tastes and textures of food, and to chuckle at Zane’s snarky t-shirts: “I didn’t mean to push your buttons. I was just looking for mute.”
Fans of Deborah Harkness (The Discovery of Witches) will appreciate McLean’s multi-faceted magical universe where a desire for the freedom to live pushes against cultural transgressions, rules, and prohibitions in an effort to alter the status quo.
McLean’s imagination is at its peak; her writing cinematic and sensory, fuelled by relentless action and sustained with tension and intensity. This is her third supernatural fantasy thriller series. She’s been the recipient of numerous honours for her Dark Dreams series and her six-book Gift Legacy series. Among them: an Eric Hoffer, CIBA and National Indie Excellence Awards, the UK Wishing Shelf Book Awards, and the Whistler independent Book Awards. McLean lives on Denman Island and is a favourite at Vancouver Island markets and festivals.
A Living Photograph on the Power of Fate
Torlée’s third and latest novel offers glimpses into the art world, exotic locales (decor, culture, and cuisines), philosophical concepts, and the interweaving of lives and histories to illustrate one universal theme: the complexity of motherhood.
Part One introduces several disparate characters who revolve around each other like planets in the night sky. At times, it’s hard to keep them straight. Twenty-six-year-old Aiden Quinn, the protagonist, is a despondent artist. His aunt, the woman who raised him when his mother couldn’t, has just died and, in his grief, he’s kicked out his girlfriend. A photograph in a magazine inspires a meeting in Vancouver with a man with an uncanny resemblance to Aiden’s long-deceased father. Turns out Uncle Stephen is “one of Canada’s best-known painters.” When Stephen realizes his nephew’s artistic potential, he offers him a chance at a new life and Aiden accepts, moving from gritty Downtown Eastside Vancouver to the glamour and glitz of life working with the El Hassans.
This is Torlée’s third book and, although it’s not described as a series, each of these character-driven books builds on another. Stephen was introduced in her first book, The Way Things Fall: a novel. We also meet Gabrielle Mazhar, an unhinged horsewoman who’s inherited an Egyptian stud farm; along with the perfect family, rich, hotelier Dominic El Hassan, his beautiful wife Amina, and their adorable children. Amina is the centre of Book Two, In Love With The Night. I’ve not read the first two books and was able to follow the story, but it would have been richer and simpler to digest if I had, due to the number of characters and detailed backstories. However, a few chapters in, things gel as we begin to travel between countries and locations.
In Part Two, we find ourselves in South America. Dominic’s in Patagonia with his perfect family. He takes his rather psychic son, Luka, to the Atacama Desert in northern Chile to view the night sky, and on their return, they meet up with Gabrielle who’s flown to Patagonia to check on horses. This chance meeting inspires a diabolical plan that propels us into Part Three. Now, we’re in Morocco, where we glimpse the true natures of our flawed characters and the lengths they’re willing to go to get what they desire. Here too, we meet Fate: “A living, breathing force out there orchestrating the details of our lives. It separates people and it brings them together.”
Dominic, who feels like a second protagonist, has an ethereal quality and is able to articulate this concept of Fate perfectly.
“Through the weaving of the countless paths of fate, the lives of the three of them under the stars tonight, the lives of people they loved in the past and would love in the future—all were meant to intersect, fuse inextricably together.”
It is the desire to be a mother that fuels Gabrielle’s criminality, and the natural force of motherhood that propels pregnant Amina to save her daughter. Aiden cannot forgive his mother for disappearing and leaving her sister to mother him, even though she’s still alive and has been desperately trying to reconnect.
To summarize this story does it an injustice. Torlée’s a masterful writer and her rich and rhythmic, cinematic prose propels us through art galleries and exotic locations into these dramatically twisted lives. The book is like a living photograph—the reader becomes immersed in the intrinsic beauty of the far landscape then zooms into the quiet closeness of a character’s soul in an intimate moment. Through photographs and paintings we are drawn in. For example, take this description of Italy, drawn from a photograph.
“Here was the house itself, a fading creamy yellow, caper flowers growing tenaciously in cracks of stone, frothing mounds of wild lavender in the gardens at the side. The pictures showed terraced vineyards and lilac skies, the medieval towers of the walled city in the distance.”
Torlée loves stars, the concept of fate, travel and the desert—motifs that define her books. In fact, she met her husband Jürgen in Cairo, on the edge of the desert with the pyramids in sight. They now live in midtown Toronto.
Lovers of travel and culture will become immersed; in fact, this would be a good book to pack on your journeys. Armchair travellers will love the tangible sketches of Chile, Egypt, Morocco, even Toronto and Vancouver, and the in-depth emotional journeys of these divergent, yet intimately connected souls, as they take A Long Walk With Fate.
Hy Brasil: Where Myth Meets Mystery and Love
I picked up this massive paperback in one of our little free libraries (a weatherproof outdoor bookcase where people leave and take books.) I physically can’t pass by one without at least a sweep through the titles. I thought it might tell the tale of Hy Brasil, a mythical island off the West Coast of Ireland, that only reveals itself in the shifting mists every seven years. The name comes from the Old Irish Uí Breasail, meaning descendants of Breasal (mighty/beautiful.)
This story was not at all what I was expecting. I read the entire book of 438 pages entranced. It contained no fantasy whatsoever and I simply couldn’t put it down. Elphinstone’s Hy Brasil is as much a treasure as the Spanish goblet Jared finds while diving off the coast.
“… it was a delicate green, dark at the base, and translucent in the bowl, like seawater … The stem widened out into a fluted base; the shape under his fingers was like overlapping petals. There were circular ridges under the bowl of the goblet. And on the side of the bowl … a galleon” (80).
Hy Brasil was published in 2002, but the author, Margaret Elphinstone, Scottish poet and retired university English professor, says she wrote it in 1996/97 while spending a happy, inspired year at Central Michigan University as a visiting professor. I wish I’d been one of her students.
The story is a mystery/thriller/adventure inspired by the author’s love and understanding of several real and literary islands.
“My island of Hy Brasil is also Caliban’s, Robinson Crusoe’s, Gulliver’s, Long John Silver’s, Peter Pan’s, Ralph’s, and a host of other more or less fictional characters. It seems that people needed to believe in Hy Brasil. Until 1865 it actually appeared on Admiralty charts.”
https://www.margaretelphinstone.co.uk
Professor Elphinstone grew up on Shetland and taught at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Being fond of islands myself, I was absorbed by the lyrical descriptions and kept flipping back to the map (using my phone magnifier) to locate key characters and settings:
- Sidony Redruth, an Englishwoman, who fraudulently won a writing competition, has been tasked with writing a series of travel books beginning with Hy Brasil, something that combines a guidebook with a narrative and first-hand experience—like Bill Bryson and my friend Bill Arnott write. Sidony begins her stay in St. Brandon’s, a town with pastel townhomes reminiscent of Ireland or St. Johns, Nfld., but she soon moves in with Lucy. Sidony’s first line hooked me: “I would hate to have to choose, but I think I’d rather have traveling than sex.” Fortunately, for Sidony, both are readily available.
- Lucy Morgan, whose great-grandfather was a pirate, lives alone in her family’s fantastical old castle, Ravnscar, until joined by Sidony.
- Jared Honeyman inhabits a lonely seabird haven on the Isle of Despair. Since the lighthouse is automated, Jared lives in the third bungalow of three and spends many hours monitoring the new gannet population (his paying gig) while exploring the Cortez, a sunken Spanish wreck (1611) off the coast for which he’s been given exclusive rights of salvage.
- Ishmael Pereira, a businessman who lives at Ferdy’s Landing with his family and supports Jared’s salvage attempts along with Per, who drives the boat.
- Columbo McAdam, journalist and friend of Lucy’s, introduces Sidony to Finnegan’s on the High Street, a lovely book shop with yummy doughnuts. Columbo’s best line: “[History] can’t be changed, therefore it has to be forgiven” (164).
- Hy Brasil sits on the North Atlantic Ridge, has three mountains and is volatile. In fact, the eruption of Mount Brasil triggers a coup d’etat against the corrupt government. Sidony climbs Mt. Brasil alone and peers down the crater into the active volcano in an exceedingly well-written chapter (24).
Like any good mystery, there are murders, cover-ups and political intrigue. Add to that: piracy, sunken treasure, drug-smuggling, love affairs, eco-adventure, an active volcano, and incredibly detailed, sensory, lyrical writing and you have a masterpiece. This book’s a keeper that I’ll return to again and again. Someone needs to produce this story as a film.
Find Me At This Fabulous Art Festival
Saturday, August 15, 2026 | 10am – 5pm
Fraser Highway One-Way, between 204th & 206th Street, Langley BC
Langley Arts Alive boasts over 200 visual and performing artists in a free street festival with artists and artisans, live demos, music and entertainment. Find me at my pop-up shop. Come by and say hello.