Taking Down Names by Bridget Canning
Breakwater Books | June 2026 | $24.95
by Trudy Morgan-Cole
Bridget Canning’s new psychological thriller, Taking Down Names, is set in two places: the geographic location of contemporary St. John’s and its environs, and the virtual space of the internet. Both locales are essential to the story, and both are depicted with vivid and insightful detail.
Jacky Careen is a St. John’s journalist mourning the death of her sister, who was the target of revenge porn and brutal online harassment in the months before she died. As Jacky tracks the online profiles of her sister’s abusers and dreams of revenge, she also notices a disturbing pattern in several recent deaths she has reported on. While the police dismiss all the deaths as accidental, Jacky begins to suspect a serial killer is at work.
The ability to evoke a sense of place – specifically, contemporary Newfoundland places – has been a hallmark of Canning’s work since her first novel, The Greatest Hits of Wanda Jaynes, and that skill is fully on display in Taking Down Names. The novel takes readers from hardscrabble towns on the Southern Shore to glitzy
mansions in the city’s east end, from downtown bars to cabin country along the TCH. It was admittedly eerie reading key scenes set in a cabin on Hodgewater Pond while sitting on the deck of a cabin on Hodgewater Pond, but such is the power of Canning’s prose that I had no trouble imagining these events occurring just across the water from my reading chair.
The main characters – Jacky and three other women through whose points of view the story is told – and a large supporting cast are depicted with the same fine and often comedic eye for detail that Canning brings to her setting. One of her most impressive accomplishments is to make Jacky’s sister, dead before the novel begins, a fully realized and rounded character through Jacky’s and other characters’ memories of her.
The thriller plot, with its timely questions about how people behave online and what consequences they should face for that behavior, unfolds at a page-turning pace that still allows space for reflection. My attention never flagged; this book was genuinely hard to put down.
Mysteries and thrillers often face a challenge with the ending: the narrative usually requires a scene where an investigator reveals what’s happened, or a villain monologues about their motives. If there’s a spot where the beautifully-executed Taking Down Names stumbles at all, it may be here: the necessary villain monologue struck a slightly contrived note in a story that otherwise feels completely authentic. However, Canning smoothly transitions out of that scene into an action-packed finale that, in the end, provides a solid and satisfying resolution.
Taking Down Names is a recommended summer read in the best possible sense: one that satisfied my desire for a great story while fully engaging my brain in the bigger themes the novel addresses. I recommend reading it on your deck of choice.
Trudy Morgan-Cole is a novelist from St. John’s, Newfoundland. She has written several works of historical fiction, including By the Rivers of Brooklyn, That Forgetful Shore, A Sudden Sun, Most Anything You Please, and the Cupids Trilogy. Her new novel, Beyond the Brightening Sea, will be released in 2026.