B.C. author Kerry Wilkinson has been nominated for a national crime writing award for his novel The Call, a psychological thriller set largely in Shawnigan Lake.
The book is one of five finalists for Best Crime Novel Set in Canada, part of the 2025 Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence.
Although Wilkinson has written more than 30 books, The Call is his first set in Canada since he moved from the U.K. to Ladysmith on Vancouver Island in 2015.
“I’m genuinely delighted by it,” Wilkinson said of the nomination. “Each step of my writing career has been pushing to see if I can do the next thing. Can I write a book full stop? Can I write a crime book? A book in another genre? A book set outside the UK? And then, yes, a book set in Canada. It’s so gratifying to have acknowledgement in Canada. I’m really pleased."
In The Call, British tourist Melody takes her family to a lakeside cabin on Vancouver Island, hoping to revisit childhood memories. But when her fiancé Evan calls to say he’s encountered a girl in distress, the line goes dead and Evan disappears without a trace. As Melody searches for answers, she’s drawn into a darker, more complicated version of the island she thought she knew.
Though British characters anchor the narrative, Wilkinson said setting the story on Vancouver Island was essential.
“I sort of cheated,” he said. “The story follows British tourists who are on vacation on Vancouver Island, where things go very wrong, very quickly. But it allowed me to tell a story that I think shows a couple of different perspectives.”
Wilkinson said this isn’t the sort of search that could happen in the U.K. The geographical and cultural differences between where he grew up and Canada gave him some fun elements to play with.
“Vancouver Island is so vast and almost all of it is untouched. Locals know this, of course. You can walk five minutes into the woods and you’re in the middle of (almost) nowhere,” Wilkinson said. “It’s not like a person disappearing in a British town, even a rural one. Here, people can really disappear in devastating, horrifying ways — and it can happen so instantly. But because there’s a road nearby, or a smattering of houses, there’s also a sense of safety, civility, and normality."
Wilkinson, who first gained recognition as a self-published Kindle bestseller in the U.K., said the local landscape has also inspired some particularly crime-writerly thoughts.
“It’s sometimes difficult to be a crime writer and not sound like a psychopath,” Wilkinson joked. “You often find yourself wandering around thinking, ‘That’d be a good place to hide a (fictional) body.’”
Winners of the 2025 Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence will be announced May 30.
