Totem by Matthew Hall

Totem by Matthew Hall

The gripping new crime thriller from the Bafta-winning screenwriter of BBC1’s Keeping Faith and bestselling author of the Jenny Cooper Coroner novels.

The day Jessie Cunningham achieves her life’s goal and is made partner in an ultra-powerful Toronto law firm, she suffers a catastrophic burnout. While attempting to recuperate, she volunteers for a charity preserving ancient trees in the wilderness of British Columbia. There she meets Todd Samson, a man with a troubled past and a wounded soul.

The attraction is instant, but they’re from different worlds… that are about to collide.

When Todd is falsely accused of murdering a local conservation officer and his beleaguered community in the Three Valleys Reserve comes under pressure from the government to swap its ancestral territory for land on the outskirts of Vancouver, Jessie is drawn into their struggle against greed, corruption and injustice.

Forming an unlikely alliance with Chief Ray Squinas and wood carver and shaman Eldon Marshall, Jessie joins them in the fight of their lives – against just the kind of dark forces she has spent her career serving.

Matthew Hall is a Bafta-winning screenwriter and novelist who lives on the England/Wales border. He trained and practised as a barrister before becoming a full-time writer in his late twenties. His first original series, Wing and a Prayer, was nominated for a Bafta and he won a Bafta Cymru in 2018 for Keeping Faith. His debut novel The Coroner was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger in 2009, as was his fourth novel The Flight in 2012. His Jenny Cooper novels were recently adapted for television in Canada in the series 'Coroner' and the first four seasons have aired on CBC. He has strong family connections to both Ontario and Vancouver and has been regularly visiting Canada since 1983.