"I don't know why this city sees fit to kill its women."

Chelsea Loam vanished eleven years ago. When Vancouver PI Dave Wakeland is hired to find what happened to the missing woman, he soon uncovers a trail leading towards career criminals and powerful men. Taking the case quickly starts to look like a good way to get killed.

Whatever ghosts drive Wakeland, they drive him inexorably, addictively toward danger and the allure of an unsolvable mystery. Invisible Dead marks the debut of one of the most acclaimed and authentic contemporary detective series.

Sam Wiebe is the award-winning author of the Vancouver crime novels Cut You Down, Invisible Dead and Last of the Independents. His short stories have appeared in Thuglit, Spinetingler and subTerrain. He is a former Vancouver Public Library Writer in Residence and the winner of the 2015 Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. Sam lives in Vancouver.

 

Sam Wiebe's profile page

Bikers, escorts & a detective with a conscience

by K.A. Wiggins

I do read mysteries, but I don't tend to read the gritty crime/noir genre. Too dark, in most cases. I loved this, though.

Wiebe captures the culture, ephemera, and atmosphere of Vancouver with endless telling details, making his narrative about crime and the seedy, dark underbelly of the city all the more alarming. Reads smoothly and convincingly, with all-too-recognizable characters. The endless men (and some women) dismissing the harm they do to others, particularly to the most vulnerable (and often First Nations and visible minority) women, are the company owners I've worked with and for, the powerful and dismissive, the entitled and self-satisfied, and most of all, the casually careless.

The specificity of eating out in Vancouver and enjoying the views are so common in the city as to be living stereotypes, and the friendly familiarity of the lifestyle and location details drives the knife in even further as one character after another drives the women who've suffered in this book, and on our streets in real life, further into the mud.

I prefer reading mysteries set in exotic foreign places and times. New York. Chicago. London. Paris. 1920s. 1940s. A crime novel calling out not only the shady hidden figures of my Vancouver, but all of us in the city, privileged and struggling alike, for glossing past, stepping over, and treating with casual disdain and irresponsibility the ones having the hardest time surviving, hits far too close to home. But there's a balance of hope and tenacity in this book that keeps the darkness from feeling entirely crushing. So I'll read more of Wiebe's work, if only to remind myself of the faces, the voices, and the stories I need to not forget.