Bernard Finds a Home in Crime Fiction

I can’t believe I left one significant episode out of yesterday’s wrap-up of high points from this month’s Bouchercon: meeting author C.B. “Chris” Bernard, the author of Ordinary Bear (2024).

That book made me a huge Bernard fan. Of it, I wrote:

Rarely have I been so deeply moved and delightfully entertained by a work of crime fiction as I was by Bernard’s second novel. The focus here is on Farley, a guileless man-mountain and oil company investigator in backwater Alaska, who, after barely surviving a polar bear attack that killed his 10-year-old daughter, heads to Portland, Oregon, hoping for his ex’s grudging absolution. There he befriends Lissa and Olive, a single mother and her sweet child, who help give purpose to his healing. But after Olive is kidnapped by a homeless man who feels wronged by Lissa, Farley musters all of his grief, might, and savvy to rescue her. While Bernard’s depiction of Portland is alternately appreciative and deprecatory (stressing its issues with the “under-homed”), his portrayal of a lonely protagonist struggling to do one last good thing is straight-ahead loving.

Bernard introduced himself to me shortly before my Friday afternoon panel presentation about critics’ favorite reads—which took place just one day after Bear had captured the 2025 Barry Award for Best First Mystery Novel. He expressed his appreciation for my having both championed his book and recommended it to other reviewers (notably editor George Easter, who did much to publicize Bear in Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine). Naturally, I asked Bernard what he was working on next, and he told me he’d recently completed “a comic novel” that was quite unlike Ordinary Bear, but which he believed had helped him evolve as a writer. He promised that his next project, though, would be a return to crime fiction.

I look forward to seeing what comes of that effort someday soon.

It’s so satisfying to find a book one loves so much, that you will enthusiastically push others to read it. Ordinary Bear was such a tale for me, and I am pleased to see that, as a result of our discussion of it during Bouchercon in New Orleans, my British friend and colleague Ali Karim penned his own, new review of the book for Shots.