This is actually a 3.5 but I give it a 4. It’s the usual deal: old guy diagnosed with terminal cancer teams up with a teenage runaway girl escaping from a sexually abusive foster parent. They run into a of couple mental deficients,thugs coming off a heist involving a tough Korean who secretly works for the Triad laundering illicit monies in a casino.

Could make a terrific if violent Disney movie. They’d need to clean up the language a bit.

Not the best crime thriller I’ve read this year but it’s not a “cozy” either. I don’t begrudge the author the twenty bucks I shelled out for it.21 s Dave3,247 396

In Nobody From Somewhere, Kalteis returns to Canada's West Coast and offers us a gritty Elmore Leonard-esque that brings together six characters from Vancouver's rough side. It starts with a retired police officer, now widowed, cancer-stricken, and walking with a cane, looking forward to the weekly meatloaf special. That's Fitch. It continues with two hard cases who think they can make a living heisting cars until a hot number named Valentina involves them in a scheme to rip off high rollers at the casino, high rollers backed by Chinese triad money, that is. And, the enforcer ain't going to be too happy about their game. Finally, we get Wren, a fifteen year old runaway who breaks into the wrong car, looking for a warm place to spend the night. In a classic crime novel sense, all these parties for better or worse cross paths. Not a big picture novel, but a smaller story about what it takes to come out alive when you cross paths with the wrong people.crime-fiction-all crime-fiction-canadian read-have7 s Eric414 31

Oftentimes, there are some novels that are just perfect for release during the warmer weather months, trips, or vacations, and Nobody From Somewhere by Dietrich Kaleties is one of those books.

Nobody From Somewhere takes place in Canada and within it, we find retired police officer Fitch Henry Haut coping with terminal cancer while living in his recreational vehicle. Fitch, who walks with a cane and is clearly not as spry as he once was, enjoys his simple repetitive life, which includes eating the weekly meatloaf offering at his favored diner. After being diagnosed with cancer, the widowed Fitch has grown stubborn when it comes to treatment and as a result, is haunted by spectral visits by his deceased wife expressing displeasure at his reluctance toward treatment.

While Fitch is being introduced, the reader is also introduced to fifteen-year-old Wren. Wren turns out to be a resourceful, mostly state-raised teenager, that decides to flee her foster home and travel to California in hopes of a better life.

Along the way, Wren encounters two dangerous thugs named Cooder and Angel. Cooder and Angel are two misfits, with Cooder being the more viscous of the two and Angel, while despicable in his own way, the lazied eyed sad-sack of the two.

When Cooder and Angel enlist the third-party help of an attractive flim-flam artist and their scam goes awry, a chance meeting with Wren and Fitch starts a deadly game of search and destroy between the schemers and newly paired teenager and infirm retired police officer. Even more, mayhem arises when an even deadlier participant becomes involved in the chase because of the failed scam.

Kalties spends a good amount of pages developing the main characters in the novel rather than introducing typical characters found in thriller novels. The time spent on the characters allows for the development of more fleshed-out characters which adds to the enjoyment of the novel.

Nobody From Somewhere is slated for a June 2022 release and is recommended to those that favor novels with well-developed characters in a good hunt and chase tale.

Netgalley provided an advanced reader copy for the return of a fair review.

This review was originally published at MysteryandSuspense.com.6 s Ken MacQueen9 1 follower

Add retired cop Fitch Henry Haut to a long list of author Dietrich Kalteis’s memorable characters. Makes me wish the author was less prone to dump his people after one book. Maybe write a series or two?
Rene Beckman, another Vancouver cop with issues and the central character in Trigger Fish, had the legs to last a bunch of books. Or Jeff Nichols, ex-con, dubious used-car salesman and somewhat endearing low-life. Jeff could have fallen out of an Elmore Leonard novel, before landing on his ass in Kalteis’s Poughkeepsie Shuffle.
Or punk-rocker Frankie Del Rey from Zero Avenue, gone after one novel. Waste of a bad-ass rocker chick with plenty of mileage left of the odometer.
Back to Fitch from Kalteis’s forthcoming Nobody from Somewhere. Don’t expect a sequel here. Fitch, some two decades in retirement, has terminal cancer. We learn that from the get-go.
The poor guy has modest ambitions: an extra-helping of butter-slathered garlic toast with his meatloaf special (what the heck, you only die once). And maybe live long enough to drive his battered tin-can of a camper to the British Columbia interior to see his granddaughter born.
After that, no chemo for him. He’s content to kick off and rejoin his late wife Annie in the afterlife. That’s the plan, until teenage runaway Wren Jones, an escapee from an abusive foster home, crashes into his life. She’s on the run from two lowlifes after she overhears them discussing the big wad of cash they scored in a casino robbery.
When the thugs try to wrestle Wren into their stolen car, Fitch has to abandon his beloved meatloaf—from a restaurant that sounds suspiciously the real-life Tomahawk Restaurant in North Vancouver—and save the girl. After that, it’s a deadly game of cat-and-mouse and cat-and-rat. Fitch is determined to save the precocious Wren from the thugs. Meanwhile the thugs are being hunted by a mobbed-up hitman because, to the surprise of nobody who reads the news, B.C.’s casinos are awash in laundered money.
Kalteis loads the book with colour from Vancouver’s North Shore, an area he knows well, as does this reviewer. It’s a strange thing having your city star in a thriller. It makes everything from the meatloaf special, to the float homes on Burrard Inlet, to even the shopping malls, look way cooler than before you opened his book.
This is especially true of the “boondockers” a tight community of nomads who live in their battered campers on North Vancouver streets—their answer to the area’s criminally high housing prices. Kalteis treats this fictional neighbourhood of eccentrics with the dignity and respect that often eludes their real-life counterparts. Let’s just say they play a heroic role in the tale.
When the time comes to part with Nobody from Somewhere, I’m going find the roughest looking Winnebago on the street and hand off my copy. It’s my way of giving a second life to Fitch and Wren. Lord knows, Kalteis isn’t the kind of guy to give these folks a sequel.
1 Lesley1,046 16


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