If the impulse to hibernate becomes just too strong over the next two weeks, here are two adventures stories that will get that sluggish body moving again—of course, you’ll have to occupy a chair to read them.
Come and Get Her by Bruce Conord
I raced through the pages of Bruce Conord’s new suspense thriller Come and Get Her to find out what deadly hazard would our hero, Jesse Arroyo, face next and whether he’d finally take one risk too many. His first-person story starts with a gripper. Jesse says it’s “the call that no parent should receive.” In the middle of the night, his ex-girlfriend Debi is on the phone telling him their daughter Sheri is missing. She and two friends crossed the Texas border to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to visit a night club. Leaving late, they were kidnapped, but one of the girls escaped and gave the police in Laredo, Texas, the sketchy details.
Sheri was the result of a one-night stand some twenty years earlier, and a longer-term relationship between Jesse and Debi proved impossible: too much social distance. Jesse joined the Army, buried himself in Afghanistan and the clandestine services for the better part of two decades, and communication between him and Debi is rare.
The Laredo police and the FBI are upbeat about Sheri’s safety and confident of the cooperation of the Nuevo Laredo authorities. They are sure a ransom demand will come, and if the family pays it, which of course Debi’s wealthy father will, Sheri will be set free. Jesse is far less optimistic. Nuevo Laredo is wracked by drug cartel violence, and two blonde Americans are prime targets for trafficking. He’s not counting on help from the Mexican police, who are too often in cahoots with the cartels. Just as bad, he doesn’t trust Debi’s dad to pay up.
Conord writes convincingly about the effects on Jesse of twenty years’ operating in a hostile environment where trust was scant on the ground, unlike regrets, which were plentiful. When Jesse goes after Sheri himself, you know this is a long-shot endeavor, even for someone with his skills and savvy.
Unlike Don Winslow’s The Cartel and The Border, the book doesn’t tackle head-on the problems created by the drugs, guns, and money sloshing back and forth across the US-Mexican border. Yet, that reality is here and makes the story feel all-too-real. That impression is aided by Conord’s portrayal of the intransigent attitudes and tactics of US immigration and border patrol personnel. The action is non-stop, and the frustrations baked into the system are acute, so that, by the last page, you may feel you need a long winter’s nap. Exciting!
The Hunted by Steven Max Russo
Another nail-biting adventure is the new thriller The Hunted by Steven Max Russo. I’ve liked his previous books, The Debt Collector and The Dead Don’t Sleep for his engaging characters and clever plots. The Hunted does not disappoint.
Ophelia Harris, a former CIA analyst working in Afghanistan for the private security firm GSG (think Blackwater), was the only survivor of an operation that went south in Afghanistan. She escaped with, worth mentioning, two suitcases stuffed with cash. What she learned before the shooting started was that the Americans were being ambushed, something only someone on the inside at the company could have engineered. Because she escaped, she knows the suspicions point to her, and she’s on the run.
Because GSG is a security operation and has an inside track with military and espionage agencies, it has the resources to find her, wherever she hides. And has. First in Florida and now, as the story opens, in New Jersey. What the company’s leaders also have is motivation, not just because they suspect her of betraying her team, but also because, unbeknownst to Ophelia, one of the Americans killed in the operation was the boss’s son.
A chance meeting of someone from Afghanistan leads to an uneasy partnership in which Ophelia and former Army Ranger Austin Medford flee across Pennsylvania. The head of GSG and two of his crack assassins are hard on their heels. The fugitives have skill and nerve on their side, while their antagonists have all that, plus virtually unlimited access to surveillance technology. It’s a crackerjack story that like Come and Get Her, leaves you breathless.
My new thriller, She Knew Too Much, is on sale now (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.). An American travel writer on assignment in Rome stumbles on deadly information.