Last Exile Q&A

Part One: Wakeland, Vancouver, Money Laundering and More

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It’s been over a decade since I wrote Invisible Dead, the first Wakeland novel. I’m grateful the series persists. The Last Exile is the latest in the series.

What follows is the first part of a Q and A on The Last Exile. The book comes out at the end of March. You can pre-order The Last Exile from IndieBookstores, Indigo, Amazon, direct from the publisher, or best of all, from your local independent bookshop.

Dave Wakeland is back! He must seem like an old friend to you by now.

I love writing Wakeland, so it was just a matter of finding the right case to bring Dave back.

The Last Exile hinges on three women: Jan Stack, a mob wife and one of the murder victims, along with her husband; Maggie Zito, a foul-mouthed East Van landscaper who’s framed for the murder; and Shuzhen Chen, Maggie’s lawyer, who calls Wakeland back to help prove Maggie’s innocence.

How has Wakeland evolved over the series?

It’s hard to say. Each book should stand on its own—you can start with The Last Exile, or with Sunset and Jericho, or with the first book, Invisible Dead. That’s one advantage a detective series has over other genres.

What evolves, book to book, is Wakeland’s relationship to the city.

Whether you grew up in Vancouver or moved here, you have a love-hate relationship with the place. You know how great Vancouver can be, and also how venal, cold, indifferent and outright hostile. And if you’re a vulnerable person, it’s worse.

This sentence really stuck out “ Living in Vancouver you ingest doses of loss every day”. The city is becoming unrecognizable at a very fast pace.

My friend Charlie Demers put it so perfectly that I added it to the novel—the city’s lost the smell of sawdust. Change is good and inevitable, but it’s also shaped by who we are and what we value.

Let’s talk about money laundering. There are so many retail outlets in this town that seem well…dodgy.

Every street in Vancouver has at least one store where you think, “How the hell is that place still open?”

I think the days of walking into a casino with a trash bag full of drug money are over. A lot of it is done online. But I think it’s still prevalent.

There are many great observations in this book. “They looked like…the kind that cheated their wait staff out of tips.” You are a keen chronicler of human behaviour, especially Vancouver human behaviour!

The kind of mystery novel I aspire to has the brain of a literary work with the heart of a Gold Medal paperback. It’s about human beings and social ills, and it’s fun. That’s what I strive for.

Part Two will be posted next week. You can pre-order The Last Exile from IndieBookstores, Indigo, Amazon, direct from the publisher, or best of all, from your local independent bookshop.