The Survivor by Sean Slater

This is the second debut crime novel by a Canadian that I’ve read in as many weeks, and another one where the main character is a police detective whose wife has died and where the criminals aren’t Canadian. But this is quite a different book from Erasing Memory. Sean Slater is a police officer in Vancouver, and he has written about what he knows – his character Jacob Striker is a detective with the Vancouver Police.

Striker’s wife has been dead for two years, and his teenage daughter Courtney isn’t coping very well. Striker gets a call from the principal at Courtney’s school, and while he is at the school learning that his daughter has skipped class yet again, there are gunshots. Fortunately, his partner Felicia is there with him, so the two of them go into cop mode and proceed to track down the source of the shots.

Unlike most school shootings, there are not one but three gunmen. Two are taken down, but one gets away. Not only that, but it quickly becomes clear that this is no ordinary school shooting and these are no ordinary gunmen.

The point of view shifts throughout the book – we see events unfold as Striker sees them, of course, but we also see what his daughter Courtney is up to (and therefore know much, much earlier than Striker how his daughter is connected to the shootings), and we see the perspective of the gunman who got away. While he’s not an easy character to like, the glimpses we get of his past are shocking, and go a long way to explaining why he ends up shooting at teenagers.

Vancouver has a lot of gang activity, and so it’s no surprise, really, that an Asian gang is at the root of this school shooting. I would like to believe that in real life, there are no gangs that carry out this kind of heartless revenge with such awful torture and violence. But Slater’s writing feels so authentic that I’m pretty sure real life is really this messy and ugly. Ugh.

I know Vancouver well, and love reading books that are set there. This was a compelling story, full of action, and a solid debut. Definitely worth a read.

This is 4/13 for me in the 5th Annual Canadian Book Challenge. All crime fiction so far, and #5 (The Water Rat of Wanchai, currently in progress) will be too… I do like my Canadian crime fiction! I’ll be branching out from that genre soon, though, since I have several non-crime-fiction Canadian reads waiting patiently on my shelf.