Today is the publication date for We Bury Nothing, published by DCB Young Readers, a YA historical murder mystery about a German prisoner of war in Canada, and the reverberations of his death in the present day. It is a story about complicity and resistance.
Bodies or secrets — nothing stays buried forever.
In 1943, German soldier Erich Stein is captured by the Allies and imprisoned at Camp 43 in Canada, where he begins to question everything he once believed about what it means to be “a good German.”
In present day, Keira Martin lands a summer internship at the museum built atop Camp 43 to work on a historical true crime research project: solving the murder of Erich Stein in 1945. But when a fellow intern drowns under suspicious circumstances, Keira unveils a potential connection between the two deaths involving the Hoppers, a politically powerful family on the museum board pushing anti-2SLGBTQ+ policies. The Hopper Scholarship is Keira’s only hope to afford her dream university, but the more secrets she digs up from the past, the less certain she is about her own future …
This is my fifth book
A fact I find wild. I had an insane ambition to have five books published in ten years (I have no idea where such a ridiculous idea came from). My first novel, Transferral, came out in 2015, so somehow I hit that target, in spite of the pandemic.
The idea for this came from my grandfather
Sort of. He was a British spitfire pilot, and was shot down over occupied France when he was 21. He spent 4 years in a prisoner of war camp, and barely survived the Lamsdorf Death March in 1945. He wrote a book of his experiences for us before he died in 2011. He was an incredibly kind man, and on his way home, after escaping his captors as Germany fell, he talked about passing a camp of German POWs, and feeling sad for them, in spite of all the people he lost, and all he endured. He did not feel sorry for the Third Reich, the leadership, or the army, but for the individual men.
That got me thinking about complicity, and how much responsibility falls on the individual in a time where the government controls major media outlets and pumps out lies and distortion. (Perhaps you see where I’m going here?). The present-day attacks on libraries, and trying to ban books (particularly LGBTQIA2S+ books) that do not fit the narrative has a horribly familiar ring to it.
However, unlike the Germans under the Nazi regime, we still have other sources of information, and face no punishment for accessing them. That’s why it was only once I learned about the Canadian camps for German POWs, and the way the prisoners found themselves exposed to a different way of thinking, that some of the central ideas of this story began to take shape.
The German POW camps in Canada are a fascinating and underappreciated aspect of Canadian/world history. I spent many weeks in the Toronto Reference Library (because that was the only place to find some of the books on it) totally immersed in learning about it.
I really hope I’ve been able to bring some of it alive for readers.