Sam Wiebe Books in Order

If you want Dave Wakeland from the beginning: Invisible Dead → Cut You Down → Hollywood North → Hell and Gone
If you want later, darker Wakeland: Sunset and Jericho → The Last Exile
If you want a standalone first: Last of the Independents → Ocean Drive
If you want a short, fast read: Never Going Back

Sam Wiebe grew up in Metro Vancouver and attended school in White Rock, and that stretch of British Columbia still sits at the center of his fiction. He writes crime novels that know the rain, the side streets, the class divides, and the strange feeling of a city changing faster than the people inside it. That close attention to place is a big reason his books feel so lived in.

Before the novels, he studied at Kwantlen Polytechnic University and later earned a master's degree at Simon Fraser University. During grad school, he decided he had to stop talking about writing a novel and actually do it. He has said he worried that, if he waited, the chance might pass.

That decision stuck.

His breakout came with Last of the Independents, a Vancouver private eye novel about a missing boy, a crooked detective, and a case that keeps getting worse the closer it gets to the truth. The book won the Arthur Ellis Award for best first novel and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize. It also laid out the qualities readers still associate with his work: quick movement, sharp dialogue, moral pressure, and a real interest in the people a city would rather look past.

Then came Dave Wakeland. In Invisible Dead, Wakeland, an ex-cop turned private investigator, takes on the long-ignored disappearance of Chelsea Loam and walks straight into the parts of Vancouver polite conversation tends to skip. Cut You Down, Hell and Gone, Sunset and Jericho, and The Last Exile keep building that world. Readers come for the private eye momentum, but stay for the harder questions about policing, money, power, and who gets protected.

Vancouver is never just scenery in a Sam Wiebe novel.

That matters in his standalones too. Ocean Drive shifts away from Wakeland but stays in familiar territory, following lives bent by violence, development, and easy money near the border. Even the shorter Never Going Back turns on pressure, bad choices, and the slim chance of a clean exit. Across the bibliography, Wiebe returns to missing people, broken loyalties, organized crime, and institutions that fail the vulnerable.

His work extends beyond novels. He edited Vancouver Noir, and his short fiction and other writing have appeared in publications such as Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. He has also served as writer in residence at the Vancouver Public Library and at Simon Fraser University, which fits his place in the local writing community as much as his publishing record.

Now he lives in New Westminster, still close to the places that feed the books. What sticks with readers is the mix of pace and perspective. You get chases, lies, dead ends, and sudden danger, but also people trying to hold on to some scrap of decency when the rules around them keep bending.