Mission Road PDF
Preview Mission Road
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series
The triple-crown winner of mystery’s most prestigious awards–the Edgar, the Anthony, and the Shamus–Rick Riordan blasted onto the crime scene with one of its freshest and most intriguing protagonists, Tres Navarre. In Mission Road, Navarre returns in a wrenching crime drama in which he must revisit the sins of the past to catch a killer about to get away with murder…again.
San Antonio private investigator Tres Navarre is used to working on the edge–that razor-sharp line between legal and life sentence. But this time he’s stepped straight into a no-man’s-land. When an old friend appears at his door spattered with blood and wanted for attempted homicide, Tres doesn’t have to think twice about where his loyalty lies–or the consequences.
Ralph Arguello is a criminal who put the street life behind him when he married SAPD detective Ana DeLeon. Now Ana’s been gunned down and her fellow cops don’t need to look far to find a prime suspect. For Ana recently reopened the most infamous cold case in SAPD history–the unsolved murder on notorious Mission Road eighteen years before that threw the San Antonio underworld into bloody chaos. Ana was about to bring charges against the suspected killer: her husband, Ralph Arguello.Tres is sure that Ralph didn’t do it–and that he didn’t shoot his wife. But with the police and the Mafia both out for revenge, there’s no one to turn to for help.
Now, armed and dangerous, the targets of a citywide manhunt, Tres and Ralph have just hours to discover what really happened on Mission Road almost two decades ago. To find the truth, they must set a collision course with the past–and with a secret that will tear their lives apart.
From the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers WeeklyThe past collides explosively with the present in Edgar-winner Riordan's relatively weak sixth Tres Navarre novel (after 2004's Southtown) when Navarre's boyhood friend, reformed criminal Ralph Arguello, appears on his doorstep wearing a blood-soaked guayabera barely one step ahead of the San Antonio police. The cops believe Arguello's wife, cold case detective Ana DeLeon, is about to name her husband as the prime suspect in the 18-year-old unsolved murder of Franklin White, son of a local organized crime boss—and, more incredibly, that Arguello shot her to slow down the investigation. Arguello convinces Navarre he's being set up, and the two of them struggle to evade a citywide manhunt and discover the real killer's identity. Riordan jump-cuts between the present and the mid-1980s to tell the story of White's murder and to provide background for the main characters, including Ana's mother Lucia, one of the city's first female cops. While the parallel narrative adds much needed depth, it dampens the pace and momentum. But the book's biggest flaw is the sitcom-like familiarity of the characters, including Navarre himself—the self-deprecating, wise-cracking PI who could only exist as a fictional trope.
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Tres Navarre might get top billing, but Riordan's latest San Antonio crime story really stars Maia Lee, the PI's cool, compassionate girlfriend. When the wisecracking Navarre's best friend is wrongly accused of shooting his cop wife, Tres goes on the lam with him to track down the real killer. But because Maia's not a police target, she has a much freer hand to crack the case. So she employs her own considerable investigative skills to work through a cold-case murder file involving the shot officer's mother, who happened to be the SAPD's first decorated woman officer. Between brief calls to Maia, Tres and his pal flee from one dangerous situation to another as the dragnet tightens. A satisfying exploration of passion's dark powers, the story moves along at a cracking pace. And although Riordan seems to telegraph the plot payoff almost from the outset, he ends up delivering several nifty twists. What had seemed to be merely an entertaining crime novel reveals itself as a clever mystery, too. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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