Book Review : Sam Wiebe - The Last Exile (2025)
Dave Wakeland is not your classic private eye. He's a cagey, obsessed and self-destructive city dweller who can manage his blood alcohol levels better than his own emotions. Haunted by a family legacy of law enforcement, he cares about truth and justice more than anyone else and yet doesn't trust anyone with it. I was happy to cross paths once more with such a difficult, but rewarding character in Sam Wiebe’s new novel The Last Exile. Sunset & Jericho felt like a logical ending to the series, but Wakeland is back, baby!
In The Last Exile, Dave Wakeland travels back to Vancouver to make good on a favour he owed to his partner Jeff Chen’s cousin Shuzhen (who I didn’t quite remember, but her name sounds hilariously like Susan), a criminal lawyer who's tasked with the impossible case of defending Maggie Zito, a woman accused of killing a founding member of influent biker club The Exiles and his wife. Not only Shuzhen and Dave need to prove Maggie didn’t do it, but they’ll need to keep her alive in the meantime.
Apocalypse As Usual
The entire appeal of The Last Exile is rooted in Dave’s estrangement of coming back into his community after a years spent on the other side of the country. Jeff and his wife Marie are not doing so well at the agency, Terry Rhodes and The Exiles seem cozier than ever on the territory and British Columbia feels as predatory as ever below its nice smile and shiny suburbs. Dave slips right back into his old haunt, like it was an old slipper and starts wreaking havoc on deserving interlopers, which is both good and bad.
I understand a series is supposed to provide you with a same-but-different feeling and have every volume be a variation on the same theme, but it feels like the opportunity for an apocalyptic return was passed by here. Everything is kind of the same in Vancouver except it isn’t. The only character who underwent a worthwhile change was Jeff Chen who always had an air of superiority to Wakeland (who admitted himself his partner was more put together than him) who had absolutely lost the plot, but it’s barely explored.
What I'm trying to say here about The Last Exile is that it offered genuine moments of tension, but it feels too easy overall. Wakeland is just coming back to town and sorts everyone’s shit out (despite the case being legitimately complicated) without really feeling morally or physically challenged. He’s playing the game on easy mode. Even Terry Rhodes, who was tucked away like a final boss in previous novels, is too easy of access here and way too nice for what he should be. The stakes feel a little low.
The John D. MacDonald blueprint
Dave Wakeland is an old school recurring character in the vein of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, who is slowly evolving from novel to novel without ever having a breakthrough moment. This kind of evolution has taken place in The Last Exile as the distance Wakeland has garnered from his Vancouver whereabouts has bestowed upon him a power of discernment and a feeling of transience that grant him with a new kind of courage under fire. Wakeland is cooler than ever, it’s everyone else who needs to step up.
As cagey and distrustful as Wakeland has been in previous novels, he feels like he has given up on the inherent value of his fellow Vancouverites here and it has granted him an upfront honesty that is quite endearing. He came back to solve problems, not to put himself back together, find answers to his existential questions and whatnot. It’s a fun evolution for the charactert and Sam Wiebe implemented it without making a spectacle, which is something he is very good at. He takes you elsewhere without you noticing it.
*
The Last Exile is a good novel. Sam Wiebe has a knack for writing intellectual beach reads that will demand slightly more out of you than whatever everyone else is reading around the pool and it's rewarding in its own right. This will get the job done and hit you with the proper dosage of dopamine. He's a fun and, most important, easy to read writer who never phones it in. As a veteran of Dave Wakeland's adventures, I was disappointed by the stakes here, though. I'm ready for something different, more intense.
