As a student, it’s difficult to find time to do things you enjoy.
Joshua Marshall, a Durham College student in the Mechanical Engineering Technician program, has somehow found the time to write two novels while still going to class.
His most recent self-published book was released in April and his first novel briefly made the top 10 on Amazon’s Canadian detective fiction chart this fall.
This novel, Spanish River: The Mysterious Franklin Street Harvest, is the second book in the series The Spanish River Chronicles.
Spanish River: The Mysterious Franklin Street Harvest follows Edward, Elizabeth, Sara and Brian trying to solve the disappearance of a young woman from Elliot Lake, Ont., about a five-hour drive northwest of Oshawa near the north end of Lake Huron.
Marshall, who is from Elliot Lake, says he wanted to put a spotlight on issues in northern Ontario, including the way people in the north feel ignored by those in south.
He also wanted to put a spotlight on the differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultures, and some of the challenges faced by Indigenous communities.
In his second novel, he “touched deeply on the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls crisis.”
One of his goals was to shine a light on where he’s from.
“A lot of people were excited to actually see that there was some form of story in their backyard,” Marshall says.
“There’s a lot of ‘us versus them’ in some aspects and I kinda touch on that in my book,” Marshall says, talking about the first book in the series, Spanish River: The River of Dark Secrets.
An example of that is “northerners versus southerners.”
“That’s a dynamic that kinda plays out a little bit with one of the police officers that comes in to try and investigate everything that’s going on,” he says.
Marshall also got his inspiration for his series from missing home.
“A lot of it is just basically being homesick, right,” he says.
Marshall started writing his first book, a science-fiction novel called Swung with the Wind, while he was sailing with the navy in 2018, while being homesick.
Marshall, who goes by the pen name J.R. Marshall, hopes to go back to writing science fiction after he finishes The Spanish River Chronicles.
The series is available on Amazon and Walmart.