Tabitha Sorenson is missing. The bright but unstable student disappeared in the aftermath of a scandal involving millions of dollars in college funds. Professor Dana Essex doesn’t think the missing money and the missing student are connected, but she hires Vancouver PI David Wakeland to find Tabitha, with whom she is obsessed.

When Wakeland discovers Tabitha has in fact stolen the money and is hiding out with her lover and reports back to his client, Essex is crushed to learn that Tabitha is in love with someone else. The next morning, Tabitha has been murdered and Essex has disappeared.

Meanwhile, Wakeland has his own problems. His former girlfriend, police officer Sonia Drego, believes her partner is corrupt. With her job–and possibly her life–on the line, Wakeland may be her best hope of uncovering the conspiracy in the department before it brings her down.

Hounded by Tabitha’s friends, the police, the press, and his own troubled conscience, Wakeland tries desperately to find Essex and make sense of what happened. Could it all have been a ruse from the start, and is Wakeland just another in a long line of suckers?

While searching for Essex and investigating Sonia’s partner, Wakeland encounters criminals, anarchists, and crooked authority figures–all of them desperate people who will stop at nothing to guard their secrets.

A captivating new thriller in the Wakeland detective series that explores the depths of Vancouver’s criminal underworld

In one moment of public violence, everything changes for Dave Wakeland. When masked men and women storm an office building in Chinatown, leaving a trail of carnage, the Vancouver PI and his partner, Jeff Chen, find themselves caught up in a mystery that won’t let them go.

The police have a vested interest in finding the shooters, and so does the leader of the Exiles motorcycle gang. Both want Wakeland’s help. The deeper he investigates, the more connections he uncovers: a reclusive millionaire with ties to organized crime, an international security company with a sinister reputation, and a high-ranking police officer who seems to have a personal connection to the case. When the shooters themselves start turning up dead, Wakeland realizes the only way to guarantee his own safety, and that of the people he loves, is by finding out who hired the shooters and why.

What Wakeland uncovers are secrets no one wants known–a botched undercover operation, an ambitious gangster and a double-crossing killer who used the shooting to cover up another crime. With a setup like this, anything can go wrong, and does. Skill and luck are needed for Wakeland and Chen to emerge with the killers, the money, and their own lives.

An ex-cop who navigates by a moral compass stubbornly jammed at true north, Dave Wakeland is a talented private investigator with next to zero business sense. And even though he finds himself with a fancy new office and a corporate-minded partner, he continues to be drawn to cases that are usually impossible to solve and frequently don’t pay.

When Wakeland is hired by a terminally ill woman to discover the whereabouts of her adopted child–who disappeared as an adult more than a decade earlier–it seems like just another in a string of poor career decisions. But it turns out this case is worse than usual, even by his standards. With only an anonymous and vaguely worded tip to guide him, Wakeland interviews an imprisoned serial killer who seems to know nothing about the case, but who nonetheless steers him toward Vancouver’s terrifying criminal underworld.

And it all goes downhill from there.

Whatever ghosts drive Wakeland, they seem to drive him inexorably toward danger–a journey he’s content to take, so long as it means finding out what happened to someone the rest of the world seems happy enough to forget. With nothing to protect him but his wit and his empathy for the downtrodden and disenfranchised, Wakeland is on the case.

The fourth thrilling installment of the Wakeland detective series, exploring the depths of Vancouver’s criminal underworld.

The mayor’s brother is missing. A transit cop lies beaten and blinded, her service weapon stolen. A new series of graffiti tags are appearing, linked to an underground group calling themselves The Death of Kings. Class warfare has broken out on the streets of Vancouver, and PI Dave Wakeland finds himself on the front lines―but unsure which side he’s on.

Reeling from a bad breakup, and increasingly alienated from the city he calls home, Wakeland nevertheless agrees to look for the missing gun. The investigation takes him from flophouses to city hall, and from a clinic in the West Vancouver hills to a mega-mansion in the exclusive British Properties neighborhood―along the way, crossing every ethical line the PI has drawn for himself. Even then, Wakeland may not be able to pull it off …