Call of the Void

Call of the Void

J.T. Siemens

Fiction

NeWest Press, 2024

360 Pages

ISBN 9781774390863

$22.95

 

Reviewed by Ali Dillon-Cardinal

“For a long time, I believed that if I ran fast enough, the dead couldn’t catch up with me. I was wrong.”

Sloane Donovan, a former police officer turned P.I. with Hard Knocks Investigation & Security Solutions in Vancouver, and her partner, Wayne Capson, take on the task of guarding Haley Cooper, a movie star addict in her early 20s.

When Cooper mysteriously falls off the grid, rumoured to be in search of drugs and parties, unexplainable connections to other cases arise. The mother of a young woman, Emily Pike, who vanished seven years ago begins to convince Sloane of a pattern that could stretch 20 years into the past. As the investigation continues it becomes clear that the women may have been drugged for a more nefarious purpose.

Donovan has had her own issues with substance abuse in the wake of the death of her family a few years prior, but still commits beyond the week she’d originally budgeted for the job. In the process, Donovan confronts ghosts from her own past: “You think the monsters have died and the ghosts have vanished, but they’re always there, waiting.  They die when you die, or maybe they follow you around for all of eternity.” 

Siemens’ gritty novel takes place during a hot summer when the skies are filled with the smoke of wildfires, the perfect setting for an uncomfortable, fast-paced, and gripping mystery heating up of as the race to find the culprit intensifies: “The smoke-filled night sky made the lights from the nearby skyscrapers seem faraway and otherworldly.”

Donovan has a unique and emotional voice that reflects her struggle to keep her bipolar condition in check: “I’m supposed to be taking my meds regularly, but I don’t because they make me feel slow, and I fucking hate feeling slow. But when I don’t take them, I drink like a fish and do all kinds of stupid shit.”

 

Siemens also gives readers the opportunity to empathize with Donovan through Jim, her boyfriend. Jim sees Sloan as a survivor, a fighter, he doesn’t see her as the weak struggling investigator she thinks she is. He and his daughter, Sadie come into Sloan’s life when she is beginning her descent into darkness and help her to keep her head above water.

 

By contrast, Wayne projects a by-the-book attitude that keeps Sloan on a tight leash, questioning her choices and struggles. As Sloan gets closer to solving the case Wayne backs her against crooked cops, laced drugs, and dealers who will go to any length to keep their crimes a secret. 

 

Siemens grew up in Vernon, BC before moving to Vancouver. After a murder occurred outside his place of work, he was inspired to write his first novel To Those Who Killed Me (2022). Siemens has studied scriptwriting as well as fiction writing and has published short stories with Mystery Weekly, Down in the Dirt, CC&D, and Vancouver Magazine.