Dead Water Creek: A Morgan O'Brien Mystery

Michael Payne is head of the Research and Publications Program at the
Historic Sites and Archives Service, Alberta Community Development, and
the co-author of A Narrative History of Fort Dunvegan.

This is the first appearance of Morgan O’Brien, one of the more
unusual detectives to appear in a Canadian novel in some time. O’Brien
is not a private detective, a member of a police force, or even a plucky
amateur sleuth. She is an investigator for a national scientific
research–funding agency, modelled on the very real National Research
Council.

At first glance, high-level scientific research seems an unlikely field
for such activity, but universities, research laboratories, and some
individual scholars do secure large grants to undertake scientific
research in Canada. With money and, perhaps more importantly, academic
prestige and university appointments at play, it should come as no
surprise that misappropriation of funds, falsified research findings,
and other types of scholarly skulduggery do occur on occasion. Research
agencies do investigate, audit, and assess projects and their scholarly
proponents, but I suspect few find such a nefarious situation as Ms.
O’Brien does. She has to wade through a complex mess of deceit and
duplicity to save the sockeye.

The book opens with the sudden and mysterious disappearance of
migrating salmon on a B.C. creek, followed by the disappearance of the
researcher tracking their migration. At the same time, an aggrieved
academic has been writing to Ottawa complaining that a major research
project on Pacific salmon population dynamics has been fraudulently
managed. The complaints were buried for months, but all of a sudden the
bureaucracy lurches into investigative action.

Morgan O’Brien is no favourite of her superiors: she is much too
independent and resourceful for that. However, through a mixture of
guile and dumb luck, she does get the assignment to go to British
Columbia to see what is happening to the salmon project. When she gets
to Vancouver, she quickly runs up against an academic rogue’s gallery
of devious graduate students, self-serving junior faculty, suspicious
project administrators, and a smart, charming, but possibly corrupt
senior professor and research director. Fishing is big business,
especially the salmon fishery, and if stocks could be manipulated the
researcher who held that knowledge would become rich enough never to
have to teach a Biology 101 course again.

This is an interesting and diverting book. Readers will learn a lot
about research funding and salmon biology. They may also be forced to
reconsider a few cherished beliefs about the gracious nature of academic
life.