HEARTS OF FLAME
(novel) 1991 Viking Canada; 1992 Penguin Canada Available from your local library or secondhand bookstore.

For Blair, Toronto had always been full of unwatched spaces - ravines, alleys, parks. That was why she liked it. She came here to be free of curious neighbours. For that, and to be famous, to make a name, to act, sing, talk or otherwise call attention to herself. In short, to disappear from people close up, and to be seen by people far away.

It was the same reason they had all come here - Philip and Ruby and Oswald...

They were Hearts of Flame - a successful Edmonton folk band - and in 1969 they thought they had it made. But just at the point of their break-out tour, it all fell apart. Ruby broke the rules.

Ruby was the first to go east. Taking Toronto by storm, she becomes a highly successful and influential fashion designer. Now, twenty years after Hearts of Flame broke up, all four members had found their way to the city.

Ruby seems to have it all: a flourishing creative business, a liberating social life. And then she disappears. That's when the dark side of Ruby's life begins to emerge: a married lover, dissatisfied backers, possible drug entanglements. When police fail to turn up any leads, Blair desperately tries to make sense of Ruby's secret life and scours Toronto for her friend. When sections of Ruby's diary mysteriously appears at Blair's home, she follows Ruby's path deeper and deeper into mystery, seeking the soul mate she lost twenty years ago, and the friend she lost only yesterday.

From the glass towers of Toronto's business elite to the shattered dreams of the city's street people, Blair searches for Ruby. What she finds are questions - questions about choices, freedom and love in all its guises. Mystery, city-scape, portrait of a generation, HEARTS OF FLAME is a novel of dreams and the price of their fulfilment.