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Background on Blue Star

Blue Star in mainly set in Vancouver, BC. Vancouver has the largest seaport on the west coast of North America and is a busy hub of commerce and industry. One theme of the novel is the shadow industry of human trafficking.

This is a map of police jurisdiction in Vancouver’s Lower Mainland. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) are responsible for the areas shown in yellow. (They also police most of the rest of BC and a good deal of the rest of Canada.)

Municipalities shown in other colours have their own police forces, for a total of six separate police forces. This unusual situation means policing is complicated in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland and in the past, information sharing between the various police forces wasn’t stellar. That fact was well demonstrated by the case of serial killer William Picton, who lived in Port Coquitlam. He killed 49 women before he was stopped. Half of his victims were Indigenous women.

About twenty years ago, two Indigenous girls who lived in North Vancouver were reported missing by their families. Within a few weeks, an eyewitness reported seeing the girls getting into a car behind an elite, private members club in downtown Vancouver. There was no investigation.