Chanticleer Book Reviews

Tag: Thriller

The CROCODILE MAKES NO SOUND (The Lord Hani Mysteries Book 2) by N. L. Holmes – Political Fiction, Crime Thrillers, Ancient Egyptian Political Thriller

Danger surfaces like a crocodile, sudden, unavoidable, and with deadly consequences in N.L. Holmes’ latest novel, The Crocodile Makes No Sound.

Politics now touch the lives of Lord Hani’s cherished family members, dear friends, and, ultimately, the society of this fragile Egyptian New Kingdom. But it’s Lord Hani’s diplomatic skills that hang in the balance and are put to the test.

Trusted allies are few and hard to recognize. The winds of change sometimes blow apart past loyalties, or so it may appear. Hani must rely on his wits and ingenuity, but will that be enough?

Hani’s beloved hometown of Waset has eerily emptied as much of the population has migrated to the highly acclaimed sparkling new capital. With his conflicting beliefs, Hani attempts to keep a low profile with his new government and urges his family to do the same for their own safety.

These are perilous times. But when his brother-in-law goes missing after being interrogated, the family fears he’s dead. In a move that Hani sees as suspicious, the king orders him to host a delegation at his home until the king can prepare to receive them. Are Hani and his family under increased scrutiny?

Under this cloud, Hani is summoned to the Beloved Royal Wife at the new capital, who entrusts him with her dark secret and pleads for his help. She is being blackmailed, and the clock is ticking before her fears will be realized. Hani is cautious, knowing he must not take any action that could stir the king’s ire. Yet he can see not only the danger to this young princess but also the broader implications to the new society if these revelations surface. He is compelled to investigate. When his suspect turns up murdered, Hani plunges deeper into a dark and menacing scheme.

Fun and memorable characters highlight the artful books by this author. While Hani probes the politics, he’s also surrounded by fascinating adventures driven by others. His daughter studies with a curious doctor in the capital. The trials and tribulations of her internship are, at times, concerning. Hani’s son follows in his father’s footsteps as a scribe, but discontent with his work suggests he may pursue a new life goal, but is that a wise decision? Beloved and trusted assistant Maya, and Hani’s daughter are newlyweds adjusting to married life and their dreams together. And longtime friend Ptah-mes and his wife struggle to choose sides in this politically charged time. They each work to decide what it is they truly believe.

N.L. Holmes blends extensive knowledge of this period in ancient Egypt and vivid imagination into a page-turning mystery spicy enough to capture any mystery and historical fiction lovers’ attention. Here we have an author who understands human nature and how that drives motives and actions to create an extraordinary story.

The captivating plot is punctuated with Hani’s delightful and insightful aphorisms. The Crocodile Makes No Sound, and there’s nowhere to hide.

October 15, 2020
NEVER AGAIN by Harvey A. Schwartz – Alternative History, Terrorism Thriller, Historical Thriller
Given recent world events (from COVID-19 to the murder of Floyd George and the subsequent civilian marches, even the boomeranging price of oil), Schwartz’s tale of Holocaust II is far, far too believable to be a work of fiction.

Imagine Tel Aviv being virtually obliterated by an atomic bomb; imagine one woman—a former NYC TV journalist—as the last one standing with three atomic bombs of her own – complete with the codes and crew to use them in the Negev Desert; imagine deciding to send one of those WMDs to obliterate Damascus. Imagine saving one of those bombs to fight another day: even if that fight happens to be in the USA.

Welcome to Israeli minster Debra Reuben’s evaporating world. Soon joining her on this incredible journey is Israeli Navy officer Chaim Levi who happens upon a luxury yacht in Spain – only to have it become the means of transport across the Atlantic to Massachusetts once he makes acquaintance with Reuben—the remaining bomb safely stowed on board.

Once stateside, it’s a matter of what to do with the radiation-oozing device. Fortunately, there are many in the Jewish community ready to help, from civil rights lawyer Ben Schapiro (also a sailplane—upscale glider—enthusiast), militant activist Abram Goldhersh and his pacifist wife, Sarah. Together, they set their minds against the president of the United States (Lawrence Quaid) and his somewhat estranged, more sympathetic spouse, Catherine. With more people arriving to join the cause, gather to join a huge protest march slated in front of the Washington Monument. But Quaid and his hawks soon decide to send over 400,000 Jews (mostly Americans—all declared “enemy combatants”) to 21st-century concentration camps.

Schwartz’s inventive fiction feels as if it’s been ripped from today’s headlines. When this review was first penned, the Toronto Star’s front page shouted this: “Trump Threatens to Use Military Force.” We all know what happened next. Never Again might be too close for comfort for some, but others may find the story cathartic. The writing, itself, is strong and well-balanced with more than a few end-of-chapter cliffhangers. Schwartz’s novel is well worth a read—especially now as his fictional vision slips closer and closer to fact.

Never Again won 1st in Category in the CIBA 2018 Global Thriller Book Awards.
October 13, 2020
BISHOP’S LAW by Rafael Amadeus Hines – African American Urban Fiction, War Fiction, Thriller/Suspense

Slow is smooth. Smooth is fast. This is the code that John Bishop, one of America’s most decorated military heroes, teaches his men to follow whether they’re on a mission in the heat of the Middle East or in the jungle that is New York’s Lower East Side in Rafael Amadeus Hines’ novel, Bishop’s Law.

To say his life is complicated is putting it mildly. In this second volume of the John Bishop series, several high-level assassins are hell-bent on killing him for his actions as a soldier. At the same time, he’s deep in his crime family’s military-style battles against various opponents’ groups. All these forces are closing in on him simultaneously, even as the United States government had hired him and his family to protect the country from bad guys using whatever means necessary.

Complicated? You bet. But if you crave non-stop action, ultra-violence, and high body counts in your novel-reading this fall, this is a great place to start.

Part Panamanian, part Jamaican with amber eyes, his face forever scarred in an assassin’s attack that killed his parents when he was nine, Bishop is related by blood to the powerful Valdez crime family. He learned from them—the ability to act, lead, protect his men at all costs—served him well as a Special Forces soldier who fought in the Middle East against a host of bad actors. By the time the story begins, Bishop has returned from overseas, living with Maria, his childhood sweetheart, and about to become a father. He dreams of leaving his military life behind but instead finds himself helping the Valdez family in a significant military-style action against Russians on New York’s Lower East Side.

The complications are only starting.

While setting up the military engagement with the Russians, he also finds out that his previous actions in the Middle East have earned him the wrath of some of the world’s most dedicated killers from Russia, Pakistan, ISIS, and even a corrupt U.S. billionaire. Not great if you want to stay alive.

While this book is clearly an action thriller, with deep roots in military-style combat, detailed weaponry descriptions, and sustained action scenes, the human story comes front and center even as the mayhem continues. Bishop is no superhero. His emotions are of a man who experiences sizeable loss and yet must keep his feelings bottled up as the beloved leader of his band of brothers. While he is wounded several times throughout the book, we feel his determination to continue doing his duty under the circumstances, few of us could sustain.

In other hands, a story of this complexity could have been cartoonish, a video game. But the book maintains a careful balance between the go-go action and the humanity of its characters.

Bishop’s Law is the second in a series on John Bishop. A third book is in development as of this writing. Readers may want to consider reading the first volume, Bishop’s War, before reading Bishop’s Law. While the book stands on its own, a richer reading experience might be had by reading the two books in sequence.

September 8, 2020
The SELAH BRANCH by Ted Neill – African American Science Fiction, African American Thriller/Mystery/Suspense, Time Travel

The Selah Branch combines two surprising stories into one enthralling whole.

It begins with a ripped from the headlines feel, diving deeply into issues of race, class, poverty, and hopelessness in Selah Branch, WV. A town whose brighter future of uplift, integration, opportunity, and prosperity was wiped out one summer night in 1953 when a chemical explosion destroyed the promising university town and replaced it with a hazardous waste site. Like Chernobyl, only with a smaller footprint and chemical residue substituting for nuclear waste. But just as deadly.

The story views Selah Branch through the eyes of Kenia Dezy, an African-American public health student on a summer practicum. She’s to determine if a simple app can steer people towards healthier food choices and better health outcomes in a town empty of jobs, filled with poverty and hopelessness, marooned in the middle of a food desert.

At first, the current state of Selah Branch and its sharp contrast with the hopefulness of its past confuses Kenia. Then she finds herself there, in that past, with the ability to re-write the history that she sees as already written in her present.

A past that contains not the tragic accident that everyone believes destroyed the town, but instead a deliberate act of sabotage designed to eliminate the beacon of hope and integration, Selah Branch. The participants mostly wanted to obliterate a place where blacks and white really were treated equally. Although some wanted to end a centuries-long family feud by murdering the bodies and the dreams of those they despised.

It is up to Kenia to use her un-schedulable, unplannable trips to that past nexus point to change the future. But there are descendants of that past who are just as willing to kill to maintain the status quo. Even if it only brings them death and destruction.

These are two great plots that shouldn’t blend well together, and yet they do, as all of the action in both the past and the present is seen through Kenia’s sharp eyes. The reader experiences her despair at the conditions in the 21st century Selah Branch and feels both with and for Kenia as she comes to the depressing conclusion that no matter how much she wants to, there are some things she simply cannot do. The situation they are living in is just too big for one person to even make a dent in, no matter how well-intentioned she might be.

And as a well-educated and relatively affluent black woman in a poverty-stricken, rural, mostly white town, Kenia is confronted with the contradiction of her economic privilege and racial and gendered lack of it at the same time.

The reader feels for Kenia’s hopelessness in the present and is swept away with her into a past where there is one desperate chance to make things better. Kenia’s journey in 1953 becomes a dangerous but determined thrill ride, facing enemies at every turn while finding surprising friends along her fast and furious way.

Readers can’t help but be caught up in Kenia’s there and back again quest to change the past and shift the present, to bring about a hope for a brighter future. Readers will cheer for her and despair with her, but they will desire, more than anything, that she succeeds.

The Selah Branch won 1st Place in the CIBA 2018 CYGNUS Awards for Science Fiction novels.

September 1, 2020
PATH of the HALF MOON by Vince Bailey – Historical Fantasy, Supernatural Thrillers, Historical Thrillers

After being charged with burglary and attempted arson, fifteen-year-old African American boxer, Curtis Jefferson, has been sent to Fort Grant, a juvenile detention area in Arizona in Vince Bailey’s Path of the Half Moon.

All of the creepy stories and whispered warnings about the former US military outpost used by the US cavalry to eliminate the Apache a hundred years ago pale in comparison to the truth Curtis finds there. Curtis faces racism from both inmates and guards, to make matters worse, he is also very aware of the presence of something not of this world. He quickly discovers (though he doesn’t want to admit it) that he is sentient to the fort’s bloody past atrocities. As the site where Pinal and Aravaipa Apaches were slaughtered, the fort seems to be a crossroads where past and present meet. From mournful coyotes to hundreds of circling vultures, Curtis can’t escape the strange visions and events inside and outside the fort. When he attracts the unwanted attention of Harvey Huish, an inmate with unusual abilities, Curtis creates a powerful enemy bent on revenge and humiliation.

A major theme of the novel is the power of language.

It appears in numerous aspects of the plot from the Apache cursing the white man’s cunning use of his complicated and deceitful tongue to Randy’s appreciation of Howard Cosell’s elevated vocabulary. The frame-story technique within the novel establishes the concept of storytelling and the influence of words. Curtis’s story is narrated by Vince, Curtis’s new friend, who relays it to the reader at the same time Curtis is telling him. As a natural-born storyteller, Curtis is the storyteller in town, and Vince sees the story as a treasure, a jewel, that Curtis has seen fit to share with him and thus sees himself as somehow honored in receiving the tale. Vince values the story as more than just words; it makes him more significant for having heard it. Though the story is unbelievable at times, Curtis does what all great storytellers do – he creates a suspension of disbelief, granting the listener the right to believe, to feel that “[a]ll things are possible,” an idea repeatedly given by various characters within the story. Through the telling, Curtis finds solace in giving his outlandish tale an authentic voice.

The theme of language also appears later in the character of Will Farnsworth, Harvey’s tortured attorney. As the newest and most talented attorney in the firm that represents the Huish family, Will has been given the unachievable task of pacifying Harvey during his imprisonment at Fort Grant. Like many lawyers, Will uses words in “purposed profusion,” trying unsuccessfully to befriend Harvey and later intimidating him with language. He attempts to use his words as weapons, rather than tools for communication, a failure which leads to his enslavement to the abhorrent Harvey.

Another aspect of the novel is the blurring of time.

The sinister fort itself is one part of this theme because it seems to exist in two time periods, its tragic past and its purposeful present. Curtis repeatedly sees images of days past that cross into his present-day 1960s. In fact, his first day at the fort, he witnesses a hanging from the Indian uprising days. Later, Curtis crosses this boundary himself and crosses paths with a murdered Apache boy. The Headmaster, Roy Whitcomb, known by all as the Lieutenant, never leaves the fort but is stuck it seems within Fort Grant’s time loop, effectively becoming “the man in the maze,” the Pima tribal emblem. He is forever trapped within the maze’s limitations and obstacles, unable to make the right choices and find his way into the next plane, the gift of a better existence. The very retelling of Curtis’s story symbolizes this blurring of time as well. During the entire story, Vince’s watch remains fixed when Curtis begins his tale, time seemingly suspended along with his disbelief.

Path of the Half Moon won First Place in the CIBA 2018 Paranormal Awards for supernatural novels.

August 23, 2020
FACING the DRAGON: A Vietnam War Mystery Thriller by Philip Derrick – Serial Killers, Military Crime Thrillers, Vigilante Justice Thrillers

Facing the Dragon by Philip Derrick explores the Vietnam War era through the eyes of an extraordinary high school student named Jim Peterson, who at fifteen made the varsity football team as a freshman. He’s intelligent as well as physically fit as he begins his journey in the backseat of a station wagon with his sister on their way to a family vacation, seemingly a typical teenager.

In the first couple of pages, his dad picks up a hitchhiker in an Army uniform, and the story takes off from there. Jim ends up separated from his family and tries to reunite with them in the Carlsbad Caverns; instead, he is the only witness to their murders.

Jim watches in horror as their bodies are disposed of in the Deep Pit of the Carlsbad Caverns, and shortly thereafter makes the decision to become the young soldier and follow the murderer to Vietnam where he will enact his revenge for his family.

Thus begins the shift to the extraordinary world of military life for our high school freshman, from a boy on vacation with his family to a young man on a mission as sleuth and soldier. The seamless way Derrick identifies the patches and medals given by the military provide clues about Jim’s father, PFC Travis Nickels, and the mystery man Ross, in a unique and interesting manner.

We learn about the importance of a crossed-double sword and a parachute on a patch. We learn a great deal about paying attention to the tiniest detail on a patch to help find clues, which our hero does several times. These subtle clues build interest in the story. The stakes are high for Jim, who takes matters into his own hands and follows the suspect to Vietnam, believing that based on the man’s patches, finding him in Vietnam won’t be an issue.

It seemed implausible for a fifteen-year-old to be deployed with the paperwork of another soldier. Jim Peterson becomes PFC Travis Nickels. Our quick-minded protagonist lies when he has to and loses important fingerprint documents at crucial checkpoints. If a corporal thinks he’s an imbecile, he doesn’t care as long as he obtains his objective.

Derrick takes us through bases and onto transports that finally bring us to the landscape of the Vietnam War, up close and personal. We are with Jim as mines are exploding all around him, as Huey helicopters are blown out of the sky right above his head, as he catches malaria and is assigned the foulest job for getting sick, which Sargent Strode believes he’s done on purpose.

We can feel the sweat trickling down backs, smell the foul orders, and see the bark split as bullets hit the trees around him.

Derrick splits the POV between Ross and the man who Jim is impersonating, taking us back to WWII Germany. The research Derrick had to do to pull this off is mind-boggling. Ross, a German soldier, the same age/era as Jim’s father, lies about who he is to escape Germany, enlists in the US military, and begins a quest to enact revenge for his brother. He is the foil to Jim who takes Nickel’s place, goes to Vietnam, to seek revenge for his family.

Theirs becomes a twisted relationship of coincidences, but a fascinating one as the truth unfolds in the tiniest hints and innuendos. The tension on every page is palpable, as Nickels finds himself fighting in a war, where race riots in Vietnam erupt off the page like something off our news feeds today. The unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the soldiers who fought in it are also examined, as well as the division in attitudes the war caused at home. The author leaves no controversial topic left unexamined.

This novel will keep readers turning pages and reading into the night. Derrick sprinkles so many interesting facts about the US military, the Vietnam War, WWII after the fall and the liberation of one concentration camp in particular. Derrick shows the daily grind of humping through the jungle, the mind-numbing boredom of waiting for battle, and then the chaos in the very-all-too-real life or death battles.

Philip Derrick does not disappoint in this military thriller. He takes us on a wild ride that hangs just this side of “what the hell?” He’s a talented author with a deft ability to capture the historical and logistical aspects of this story without losing credibility or the reader’s confidence. Facing the Dragon is a book for all readers, not just those who love a great mystery/thriller or historical war story. One of our favorites!

Facing the Dragon won First Place in the CIBAs 2018 CLUE Awards for mystery/thriller novels.

August 18, 2020
The QUISLING FACTOR by J. L. Oakley – Historical European History, Wartime Fiction, Historical Military Thriller

During World War II “quisling” became a byword for a particular type of traitor, one who not only betrays their own country but also actively collaborates with the invaders. The origin of the term was taken from an actual person, a Norwegian named Vidkun Quisling, who didn’t merely cooperate with the Nazis but actually headed a collaborationist regime in his own country.

The Quisling Factor takes place in the immediate post-war period, as the Nuremberg Trials are gearing up in Germany. Norway is conducting its own post-war legal purge of collaborators at all levels of government.

The story is a direct follow-up to the author’s award-winning World War II novel, The Jøssing Affair. This second novel focuses on the physical and emotional toll of war, and its precarious weight of peace on the survivors.

While the events of J. L. Oakley’s latest novel directly relate to those in The Jøssing Affair, each book is quite capable of standing alone. The first one deals directly with the dangers of war, particularly for those who were part of the anti-Nazi resistance. The Quisling Affair is a peacetime story. While the novel definitely deals with the war’s aftermath, it also sits on the chilling crossroad between a spy thriller and Nordic noir, as the dangers faced by former intelligence officer, Tore Haugland, his wife Anna and his Norwegian family face in two directions.

During the war, Tore was captured by the Gestapo, then tortured by Henry Oliver Rinnan, a Norwegian who ran a notorious organization that targeted resistance organizations in the Trondheim region. He is now scheduled to testify against Rinnan and his vicious gang. While those leaders are in prison, someone on the outside clearly does not want Tore to testify. His family is being threatened to perhaps block his testimony. There is also the possibility of betrayal from within. Not all of Tore’s Norwegian family is willing to accept his half-German, half-American wife as they are unable to separate their suffering at the hands of the Nazis from her heritage.

This meticulously researched historical epic delves deeply into the traumas of all the survivors, whether military, resistance, or civilian, as well as peering into the abyss that lies between the horrors behind them and the hopefully brighter future ahead. The reader sees into Tore’s mind and empathizes with the way that his war continues to eat at him – and his heart that has chosen not just to survive but to love again.

We highly recommend The Quisling Factor for readers looking for an exceptional post-WWII story, for a fantastic thriller with both espionage and domestic elements, and for anyone who loves Nordic noir and would like to see it set in another era. This book is a winner.

The Quisling Factor won the Hemingway Book Awards Grand Prize for the 2020 Chanticleer Int’l Book Awards.

July 20, 2020
TOKYO TRAFFIC by Michael Pronko – International Crime Thriller, Detective Story, Crime Thriller/Suspense

Michael Pronko’s novel, Tokyo Traffic, the third book in the Detective Hiroshi Series, will pull you in from the first page and keep you turning to the final word. He develops a mystery/thriller that gives nothing away while leading us down dark back alleys in his exotic Japanese Tokyo Prefecture setting.

The title, Tokyo Traffic, catches our imagination, as though the book might explore densely populated Tokyo and the traffic that gets snarled on freeways and down narrow dori’s, or the pedestrian traffic that surges through Shinjuku and down crowded sidewalks almost shoulder to shoulder in a sea of humanity. And actually, he captures both of those meanings in his book, but he also explores the underlying theme of human trafficking, especially of underage girls.

Pronko develops a rich cast of characters and builds a dangerous and evolving world in which they play hide and seek. Sukanya, a fourteen-year-old Thai girl and overall kickboxing badass, is our first point of view character. She escapes a murder scene with clothes she scavenges, a wad of bills, a laptop, an iPad, and thus begins the wild ride, Tokyo Traffic.

Sukanya runs from Kenta, another badass, but one who finances the porn and human trafficking, while racing his Nissan GT-R down Tokyo’s highways and byways, avoiding the law and Kirino. Kirino would like to teach him a lesson, the hard way.

Our hero, Detective Hiroshi, finds himself in the middle of a Tokyo that most tourists never see. Hiroshi chases Kento and Kirino, a larger fish in the human trafficking pond. They race from the docks of Yokohama to hard porn studios in downtown Tokyo. Hiroshi follows the money, and Pronko gives us the world of crime using cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.

This is a convincing backdrop that doesn’t overpower us with corruption and porn but focuses on the characters and their struggle to survive. Pronko handles his plot and world-building deftly and creates a sympathetic vehicle to explore and bring light to the horrors of what it might be as a child caught up in the drug-addled world of human trafficking and child porn.

Tokyo Traffic is a fast-paced thriller that introduces us to a world we might have heard about on the news. Pronko develops characters that leap off the page. We want them to escape, we want them to get caught, we want them to solve the case, and Pronko keeps us guessing right to the end, as we wonder who will eventually win in this high stakes game of humans for sale.

This book will not disappoint, in fact, you won’t be able to put it down.

(Find a link to The Moving Blade, review here)

May 27, 2020
SCARE AWAY the DARK: A STONE SUSPENSE by Karen Dodd – Int’l Mystery & Crime, Psychological Thriller, Literature

Scare Away the Dark raises the bar for exciting suspense stories as Jordan Stone, a young millennial who has made it as the top newspaper investigative journalist in Vancouver B.C., traverses dark physical and psychological landscapes on what becomes a life or death mission. On this journey, she encounters characters for whom human life is cheap, evil deeds are part of doing business, and revenge is an art form.

Lured by the promise of information about the whereabouts of her parents who seem to have disappeared from a witness protection program, Jordan passes up Friday evening happy hour at a pub with her coworkers in favor of a clandestine meeting with a long-time confidential informant. She has no inkling, as she drives for more than an hour through pelting rain to the agreed-upon rendezvous site, that her life is about to change forever.

Jordan meets, rather than her trusted tipster, a stranger with a different agenda. He’s a perverted monster who abducts Jordan, holds her captive in a remote underground bunker, and abuses her in unthinkable ways for what seems like forever.

Fifteen days later, the traumatized Jordan is discovered and rescued by the RCMP. One of her rescuers, Inspector J.J. Quinn, aggravates Jordan by persistently following up on her kidnapping. When she can’t remember details, he pushes her to face her demons—urges her to undergo hypnotism and therapy to unlock her memories.

After a subsequent attempt on her life, and reluctantly beginning victim therapy, Jordan takes a leave of absence from the newspaper to rethink her future. Assisted by her long-time friend and research assistant, Rachel Sommers, and former inspector Quinn, newly minted as a private investigator, she seeks to learn why she became a target in the first place. As she continues to pursue what she was working on before her abduction, an investigative piece about an Italian crime family and its far-reaching tentacles, little does she suspect that these two pursuits connect in the most inconceivable ways.

Scare Away the Dark at times leans heavily on backstory information from Dodd’s previous book, Deadly Switch, which tends to slow the pace and is sometimes confusing. However, Dodd offsets this by coupling the stuff of contemporary headlines—man-made plagues of criminal activities and the power of true love—with meticulously reimagined settings, multi-dimensional characters, and complex sub-plots, to create an engaging romantic thriller.

With an ending that comes out of left field, Scare Away the Dark leaves the reader with a gasp and ready for what happens next. Caution: Read with the lights on and the doors locked!

Scare Away the Dark won first place in the CIBA 2018 CLUE Awards for Suspense and Thriller novels.

January 30, 2020
NO WINTER LASTS FOREVER by Jonathan Epps – Vigilante Justice Thrillers, Literature, Thrillers

There is a frequently paraphrased quotation that goes, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” But there is also a well-known aphorism that “the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” This is a story where those truisms come together like a train wreck, at the very least a commentary on one of the darkest underbellies of American subculture.

No Winter Lasts Forever by Jonathan Epps takes place in the present, with mass shootings in the news every other week, an opioid epidemic that’s out of control, and an entire generation of young people who will, by all current economic measures, not do as well as their parents, let alone better, as previous generations have before them.

This story also takes place inside the head of Jackson Warner, a 52-year-old man in tiny Franklin, Missouri, who learns of a shooting at the school where he taught for many years. If matters can be worse, and they are, Jackson discovers his 21-year-old nephew is on the exact same path as the shooters.

Jackson won’t allow him to sit idly by. He needs to do something to fix what feels like his little corner of the national malaise. Even if all he can really do is attempt to get his nephew on a different course. He wants justice.

The story here is, in many ways, Jackson’s descent into a kind of madness. He begins to haunt the underground internet chat rooms where misguided young men trash talk each other and discuss gunning the world down. He loses track of his real life, his girlfriend, his family, and especially himself.

It’s not an easy read. Jackson’s online flirtation with those who want to end it all and take as many as possible down with them is visceral. As his walk through very dark places consumes his life, he takes on a few too many of the attitudes of the young men he says he’s “investigating.” His anger at everything he sees wrong in society is palatable and soon spins out of control.

Readers may feel that his descent into that underworld goes on a bit too long, or at least reading about it does. The online chat room language is repetitive, incoherent, unrelieved in its violence, and probably requires all the trigger warnings available for a SWAT team to mobilize. It feels authentic, and it’s terrifying. However much like a train wreck, Epps’s writing is so compelling that readers will be unable to turn their eyes away; in fact, they won’t be able to put the book down.

And just when he seems to draw back from the madness all around, it comes for Jackson and those he holds dear. He has ignored Friedrich Nietzsche’s warning. He has gazed into the abyss too long, never realizing that the abyss has gazed back at him.

It may be true that “no winter lasts forever,” but when the metaphorical spring finally comes, will it be enough to bring Jackson Warner into the light? You’ll have to read it to find out!

This story is an affecting read, but not a comfortable one. The reader is inside Jackson’s head every step of the way and wants to urge him to retreat before it is too late. That he does not, causes the reader to close the book with a shiver of dread. And that’s exactly the thing that makes Jonathan Epps one of our favorite new thriller authors.

January 6, 2020