Terminal City — James Ferron Anderson

The week before WWII breaks out wealthy Pug Westwood throws a Vancouver beach party: by the next morning his son Harry is dead, petty crook Emmet Fanning has fled to LA, and Emmet's girlfriend Mia and taxi driver Dan Kearney are having a fling. Twenty years later Emmet, now a scandalous Hollywood star, is back, his seventeen-year-old girlfriend struggling to keep him alive and sober. As Emmet's old enemies resurface, Mia seeks out Dan again and asks for his help. On the corrupt, yet oddly innocent, city streets of 1950s Vancouver, cops, criminals, lovers, the wealthy and the broken play out the long-delayed finale of a deeply personal drama. Eden Robinson, author of Traplines, Monkey Beach, Blood Sports and Son of a Trickster: “What Raymond Chandler would have written if he'd lived in Vancouver. When Chandler-esque noir meets rainy Vancouver, you get Terminal City, a marvellously observed novel. International film star Emmet Fanning returns to Vancouver in 1959, re-igniting a cold case on Wreck Beach full of old flames and grudges. The wry, clear-eyed narrator, WWII vet Dan Kearney, navigates the shady world of the wealthy and the corrupt as he untangles truth from lies and love from convenience. There is a fantastic way of unrolling information, and the rising tension is great. Immensely readable, thoroughly enjoyable.” Frances Greenslade, author of Shelter: “I felt totally immersed in the story. In rich, evocative prose, Terminal City summons the spirit of Vancouver on the cusp of World War II and its aftermath. But behind the gloss of familiar rain-slick landmarks, a grittier story unfolds, told in the endearing voice of Dan Kearney, a perpetual outsider. James Ferron Anderson has created an unsettling world that lingers in the memory. I am in awe of the creation of this world.” Claudia Cornwall, author of At the World's Edge: Curt Lang's Vancouver, 1937�"1998: “One of the great pleasures of Terminal City is Anderson's note-perfect rendition of Vancouver in 1959. It's all there: a seedy beer parlour on Carrall Street, the glossy Hotel Vancouver, Ho Ho's in Chinatown, the Cave and Penthouse nightclubs, a new money mansion in the British Properties, an old money mansion in Shaughnessy, the Sylvia Hotel, Wreck Beach, and rainy neon-lit streets. The book's diverse cast of characters include the dissolute and charismatic Emmet Fanning (a near clone of the Hollywood actor Errol Flynn, who died in Vancouver in 1959) as they collide over a murder investigation, and keep the plot humming nicely.”