Demon Spirit, Devil Sea
By Charlene D’Avanzo
Published by Maine Authors Publishing
Pages 278 Price $15.95 Paperback

Maine ecologist and environmental educator Charlene D’Avanzo, has written an action packed fictional mystery dealing with ocean travel in a kayak. The author is an award winning environmental educator who lives in Yarmouth, Maine. She has had more than 25 years of experience navigating the waters off our coast in a kayak, which is her specialty. She is considered a scientific expert in her field of detecting pollution and preserving  clean waterways.

In this mystery dealing with the sea, the protagonist an oceanologist Mara Tosconi, is familiar with kayaking off the coast of New England and Maine. However, in the story she gets a fictional request by the United Nations to come to the west coast  to investigate an island called Haida Gwaii which might be contributing to a pollution problem. While the story is fictional the island of Haida Gwaii really exists and is located in a group of islands off the coast of British Columbia.There is a small map in the  beginning of the book showing  that the island is located above Seattle and Vancouver just beyond British Columbia in the Pacific Ocean.

In the opening of the book Mara almost gets killed in the Pacific Ocean riptide currents which surround the island of Haida Gwaii but she survives. A marine scientist, she is an experienced person in handling a kayak on the sea but the Pacific Ocean is a totally different challenge and the rudder of her kayak becomes severely damaged.

At one point kayaking on the Pacific Ocean, she thinks she sees a strange birdlike creature with blood- red coloring approaching her boat, but she brushes the brief vision off, considering it a reflection of the sun on an image. She does not believe in spirits even though the folklore of the place says that demon spirits exist.

The focus of the story is not on folklore but many interesting  folktales of the locale are included and parts of the book remind me of Margaret Mead’s writings of aboriginal people because the inhabitants of Haida Gwaii reflect an isolated culture with their own supernatural beliefs and superstitions.

However, the focus of the novel is on an investigation of a crime on Haida Gwaii island and the crime’s impact on the ocean around it. An iron fertilizer may be the heart of the problem. In real life Roger Grant, an entrepreneur, had dumped tons of iron slurry right off their coast. That fact was the inspiration for this fictional story. Actually this novel caused  me and possibly other people  reading the novel to become more aware of what we throw out into our ocean.

Mara thinks about Maine as she hears about the environmental problems off the Pacific coast near Haida Gwaii island. She thinks, “Most people are unaware of pollution and its extent, as well as climate change and its impact on the environment.” She even thinks, “Maine lobstermen should care that warm sea water is chasing lobsters north to Canada. But many deny that climate change is even happening.”

As an environmental expert from the Maine Oceanographic Institute, Mara and another scientistic colleague named Harvey, a woman, join a team to investigate the pollution problem off the coast off Haida Gwaii island. Their adventures are endless, exciting, and spellbinding.

They explore the microscopic algal cells in the water caught in a mesh and place them in a bottle and find pollution.

They also enter another culture on the island and learn their beliefs and superstitions. In the world of Haida Gwaii, there are two clans, the Ravens and the Eagles, who compete with each other and do not accept outsiders like Mara and her colleagues.The natural environment is beautiful but also presents a danger. The ocean is not always friendly, and large animals like bears have charged not twenty feet away from her.

This fascinating work unites two oceans, the Atlantic ocean and the Pacific ocean. It is  a book for those who love stories about the sea, the natural environment, and legends of isolated cultures. The writing style is beautiful and refreshing. It often includes the drama of life or death struggles as the story emerges.  The author’s descriptive style is both poetic and scientific as she describes adventures on land and sea.

In fact the author has been a Professor of Ecology in the School of Natural Sciences and has a PH.D  through the Boston University Marine Program at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. An intellect, she uses poetic prose in describing nature, scientific terms in describing biology,realistic language when portraying characters as angry and humor under pressure.

Her great passion is the sea and preserving it. I recommend it highly to all people who love the sea and the protection of it.

— Pat Davidson Reef is a graduate of Emerson College in Boston. She received her Masters Degree at the University of Southern Maine. She taught English and Art History at Catherine McAuley High for many years. She now teaches at the University of Southern Maine in Portland in the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, Classic Films. She recently wrote a children’s book,”Dahlov Ipcar Artist,” and has now completed another children’s book “Bernard Langlais Revisited.”