May 21, 2025

Catch You on the Flip Side, by Lee Kvern

All right, buckle up. Lee Kvern’s Catch You on the Flip Side, whose central setting is a Calgary casino in the early 1980s, begins at a pig farm in the Philippines, where the farmer is recruited for a mysterious mission. From there, we arrive at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, site of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, where Senator Benigno Aquino Jr., Opposition Leader of the Philippines and a threat to authoritarian President Ferdinand Marcos, pays a brief visit before his return to his country from exile, a return that he knows will put him in grave danger. And then we meet a Manila baggage handler who will be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and forced to sneak out of the country, the piece of the puzzle that connects Aquino’s murder to the staff and patrons of the Calgary casino where shady dealings are ongoing and will have ramification for everybody involved for the next 40 years.

I’m a huge fan of Kvern’s work, both its energy and its scope, and I love how I picked up this novel with no idea where it would take me—and how it took me everywhere. There’s audacity in writing a novel about a real life political assassination on the other side of the world, and I love how Kvern pulls it off (and also how much more I know about contemporary Filipino history after reading it). A story this tangled can be disorienting at times (and I wish the book’s production had been more robust—there are several copy edits and messy typesetting that adds to the confusion), but I read it gripped and finished it satisfied. Funny, moving, and epic at once, Catch You on the Flip Side is a standout.