FAKE OUT

Bayko’s debut mystery novel explores the intersection of hippie culture and murder on the Pacific Northwest coast.

On Vancouver Island’s west coast in the spring of 1968, the counterculture of the ’60s collides with the lingering ghosts of earlier frontier days. Sandy Chambers, a 20-year-old, hitchhikes north from Victoria, hoping to escape her conventional parents and find freedom among the hippies, surfers, and American draft dodgers camping along the beaches of Tofino and Ucluelet. When Sandy accepts a ride from a charismatic Californian named Geoff, she’s swept into the illusion of an idyllic, carefree world—but she hadn’t expected the beach to be so far from everything, “nor had she anticipated the depth of darkness at night.” In the morning, Geoff turns up dead, and suddenly the pristine foggy beaches change from a love-in to a menacing crime scene. Sandy resolves to stay, integrating herself with the other young people working at the majestic old inn near the beach. It’s there that she starts to uncover surprising information about her new friends that may be the key to solving Geoff’s murder. As the investigation unfolds, the era’s hazy mix of idealism and indulgence gives way to unsettling rumors about drug smuggling and growing tensions between longtime locals and freewheeling surfers. Bayko’s story leans on familiar mystery structures, but its vivid sense of place helps to set it apart. The beaches, fog, and the “magic castle” of the Wickaninnish Inn make the “edge-of-the-Earth feeling” of Vancouver Island tangible. Bayko has an ear for dialogue—especially among inn workers and locals grumbling that “the draft dodgers and hippies have taken over Wreck Bay again”—that captures the era’s fascinating generational friction. The mystery resolves with a conventional, if satisfying, twist, but it’s the sensory immersion in fog, surf, and danger creeping in that will have readers wanting to return to this beach.

A whodunit with a straightforward plot but engaging atmosphere.