Back in 2004, while I was promoting my paranormal suspense thriller DIVINE INTERVENTION, my mother came to visit. We were talking one day about locating old friends and I'd mentioned I'd had some luck finding some of mine. Then she told me about a female friend whom she'd lost touch with.

This friend had a dream--she wanted to take a trip down a river that was very dangerous. People had gone missing from that area in the past. I thought it was kind of weird that someone would want to travel down a river like this, knowing they might never come back.

Of course that thought instantly spawned the thought of: where do these people disappear to? And that sent the story wheels in my mind turning. I immediately started plotting a new novel based on this premise.

Since I like to set my books in Canadian locations, I asked my mother which river it was, but she couldn't recall. She thought it was somewhere in northern British Columbia, at first. So I started researching rivers. Nothing in BC seemed to resemble this mysterious river.

Ironically, months after my mother left I was channel surfing and came across a documentary about a river. I'd caught the last few minutes of it. The host was talking about a strange rocklike formation he was standing on. "Tufa mounds," he called them. They looked so strange and were huge mounds made from water bubbling up to the earth's surface. The show ended and I never thought about it again. I was sure at the time that the river (which I never heard named again by the end of the show) was somewhere overseas.

Finally, it came time for me to start my heavy research into this new novel about a killer river. I opened my search parameters, hoping to find a river in Canada that had a similar history. I had no idea that I was about to stumble across one of Canada's most mysterious rivers, the Nahanni River in Canada's Northwest Territories. As I read about the Nahanni, I became more positive that this was the river my mom's friend had been talking about.

When I saw some of the photos of the area, my heart stopped. There were the strange mounds from the documentary I'd seen. I'd had no idea at the time that I'd been watching a show all about the Nahanni River. This was a "Eureka!" moment for me, especially once I started reading about the history.

In the early 1900s, the McLeod brothers set their sights on finding gold and they headed north to the Nahanni River area. They were later found dead, murdered in the night, their heads cut off and their bodies still in sleeping bags--as one account tells it. Another account says their bodies, or at least one, were tied to trees. Their murderer was never found. This area of the Nahanni River is now called Headless Valley.

I wrote and edited THE RIVER in 5 months, and some of the Nahanni's history has been woven into my novel. Since THE RIVER was released in 2005, I've had people email me from all over the world, wanting to travel this fascinating river. I've also had emails from people who've taken the trip down the Nahanni. My novel brought back great memories for them, and one man said I'd described his trip perfectly--until my novel reached a major twist. "I don't recall that part," he said, laughing.

I invite you to take a ride down the mysterious and deadly Nahanni River and explore some of its ancient history. Ill let you be the judge of where fact ends and fiction begins, as I take you through the wilds of the north and into a dangerous world of technological conspiracy.

Explore a river often referred to as the Bermuda Triangle of Canada.

I hope you enjoy the ride.

~ Cheryl

THE RIVER by Cheryl Kaye Tardif

http://www.cherylktardif.com/the-river