George Mercer, a former Jasper National Park Warden has just released Wood Buffalo, his second novel in the Dyed In The Green series, the first fiction series about Canada’s national park wardens and their battles to protect our country’s special places.
Mercer, who was born and raised in Newfoundland, worked in six national parks across the country including a seven-year stint in Wood Buffalo National Park and ten years in Jasper, before retiring in 2012 after a thirty-five year career with Parks Canada.
Mercer attributes much of the inspiration for his writing to his experiences working throughout Canada, with each book set in a different national park as the stories follow the main characters from Nova Scotia to British Columbia’s Southern Gulf Islands and back again, concluding on the east coast in Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Cape Breton.
While the first novel, Dyed In The Green, was set along the world-famous Cabot Trail in Cape Breton Highlands National Park and tells the story of the park wardens’ battles with a notorious poacher, Wood Buffalo focuses on the fight to protect the bison population on the northern plains of Wood Buffalo National Park, slated for slaughter because of concerns about disease in the herd.
Works of fiction that bridge the gap between mystery and suspense, the Dyed In The Green series opens the door for a new genre of novel that provides a refreshing perspective on the efforts to protect our most iconic wild places and the species that live there.
Subsequent books in the series, including Book Three – Jasper Wild, due out next year, will build on the notion that our country’s national parks are under threat from within as well as from outside forces, and these threats have to be met head on by our park’s protectors.
Wood Buffalo and Dyed In The Green are available in bookstores across Canada including the Bluerock Gallery in Black Diamond, as well as Amazon and Kobo Books.