No Going Back by Sheena Kamal

No Going Back by Sheena Kamal
Audiobook [9 hours] read by Bahni Turpin
HarperAudio, April 2020

Third in a series featuring Vancouver private detective Nora Watts, a woman of mixed heritage -- a Palestinian mother and an Indigenous father -- who is (somewhat unsuccessfully) dealing with past trauma. You don't need to start with the first book, The Lost Ones, because you can get caught up on what's happened previously through clues in the third. Still, it's best to do so. Part of the appeal here is getting emotionally invested in the character development through the series, plus the plot in No Going Back is tied to activity in the previous books.

There isn't much humour in this atmospheric novel, but I did chuckle at the following passage:

        He wanted to go to Alberta and see a new purple coloured ribbon of light in the aurora borealis that scientists are calling Steve. Even though it's now known that Steve is actually a 25 kilometre-wide concentration of hot gases, he still thinks it's worth a trip to Alberta, which is insanity. Nothing is worth going to Alberta.

Noir thrillers aren't my usual fare but I do appreciate a feisty female lead who isn't great at interpersonal relationships. She's an outsider, a recovering alcoholic, living amidst the social disorder of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. She is still in the process of discovering her own self worth. The suspenseful audiobook is performed by the incomparable Bahni Turpin.

Giller chances: LOW - I would say the third in any series doesn't stand a chance at a literary prize, but then there's Hilary Mantel's The Mirror and the Light, third in the Cromwell series, that could prove me wrong by winning the Booker.

This post is part of a series. I'm on the Shadow Giller jury this year, so I'm reading as many qualifying Canadian titles as possible in order to come up with my own longlist prediction before the official one that will be announced on September 8, 2020. To see my other reviews that are a part of this project, click on the Shadow Giller tag. Also, please visit our Shadowing the Best of CanLit website to see what the rest of the Shadow Giller jury are up to. Thanks for visiting my blog.