"Sunset and Jericho"

Sam Wiebe is the award-winning author of the Wakeland novels, one of the most authentic and acclaimed detective series in Canada, including Invisible Dead (“the definitive Vancouver crime novel”), Cut You Down (“successfully brings Raymond Chandler into the 21st century”), Hell and Gone ("the best crime writer in Canada"), and Sunset and Jericho ("Terminal City’s grittiest, most intelligent, most sensitively observed contemporary detective series").

Wiebe’s other books include Never Going Back, Last of the Independents, and the Vancouver Noir anthology, which he edited.

Wiebe’s work has won the Crime Writers of Canada award and the Kobo Emerging Writers prize, and been shortlisted for the Edgar, Hammett, Shamus, and City of Vancouver book prizes.

Wiebe applied the Page 69 Test to Sunset and Jericho and reported the following:

Sunset and Jericho is about class warfare. Two murders take place on the same night, on different beaches in Vancouver. A very rich man and a very poor man. It falls to PI Dave Wakeland to find out who committed these crimes, why, and how the two deaths are connected.

On page 69 of Sunset and Jericho, Wakeland reports a break-in at his office to the police. He thinks it’s linked to the death of Jeremy Fell, the ne’er-do-well brother of the mayor. The killers have sent him a warning. The task force members, Gill and Dudgeon, feel otherwise. They treat the break-in as a red herring, and a waste of their valuable time.

I took them down to view the electrical room.

“This door’s usually locked?” Dudgeon asked me.

“Always.”

“But the key is just lying around your office.”

“It’s in a drawer in a locked office, under video surveillance. Was I supposed to have an Indiana Jones boulder to protect it from being stolen?”

“You’re the security expert,” Gill said.

Page 69 doesn’t tell the reader much about the overall plot, but it does illustrate one of the main conflicts between Wakeland and the authorities. Sunset and Jericho pits the city’s wealthy against a mysterious group of violent young radicals. Wakeland is caught in the middle.

What happens when the rich become so insulated, so indifferent, and the city so unaffordable, that people start lashing out, striking back? In a situation like that, what’s the meaning of justice? And what happens when the detective has more in common with the perpetrators than the clients and victims? That’s the situation Wakeland finds himself in. As this passage suggests, he’s very much on his own.

Visit Sam Wiebe's website.

The Page 69 Test: Invisible Dead.

The Page 69 Test: Cut You Down.

Q&A with Sam Wiebe.

The Page 69 Test: Hell and Gone.

Writers Read: Sam Wiebe (March 2022).

My Book, The Movie: Hell and Gone.

--Marshal Zeringue