Preview Safe and Sound
Bounty hunter Jack Keller faces his most dangerous and sadistic enemy yet in this explosive Southern thriller...
Jack Keller works in fugitive apprehension, and never feels more alive than when he’s hunting down a skip. But when a young girl goes missing, and Keller finds out that the father is an AWOL member of the army’s elite Delta Force, he knows immediately that this case will be anything but fun and games.
Keller is a Gulf War vet who knows his way around the Army’s red tape, but the psychological scars from his experiences in the gulf have only just started to recede enough for him to live and love again. No one is sure how taking on the kidnapping case will affect him, least of all his girlfriend Marie, who’s counting on Jack’s recovery if they are going to have any future together. But a young girl’s life hangs in the balance, and a shadowy group of missing Delta commandos seems to be the key to finding her. For Jack Keller, it’s not an easy decision, but it’s the only one he can make: consequences be damned, he’s going after the girl.
From Publishers WeeklySet in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, Rhoades's solid third mystery to feature rugged bounty hunter Jack Keller (after 2006's Good Day in Hell) wastes no words. Keller loves his work: it keeps him from dwelling on the past. When a young girl goes missing, his suspicion first falls upon the child's father, David Lundgren, a member of Delta Force. Keller wades through military bureaucracy—dealing as best he can with his own ineradicable memories of what he saw during the first Gulf War and the way the army treated him afterward—to learn that Lundgren has also disappeared; Keller quickly begins to suspect that the actual story is more complicated than it first seemed. Soon he's proven horribly right. Crisp dialogue and the author's deft use of local color support a narrative driven as effectively by characters as by events. (July)
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No one is safe and sound in Rhoades' third thriller starring Arkansas bounty hunter and shell-shocked Gulf War vet Keller. This time he tangles with a stone-cold killer, South African mercenary DeGroot, who's trying to close the deal on a multimillion-dollar scam he and several Delta Force commandos set up in Afghanistan. But there are some messy details that need cleaning up, prompting DeGroot to kidnap the son of one of the commandos, whose wife hires Keller and his girlfriend, PI Marie Jones, to find the boy. Inevitably, the chase turns into a confrontation between Keller and DeGroot, and the collateral damage threatens everyone and everything Keller holds dear. Like James W. Hall's similarly one-named hero Thorn, Keller faces a soul-crushing catch-22: he must unleash his propensity for violence to protect his loved ones, but by doing so, he alienates himself from those he seeks to save. Rhoades explores this psychological conundrum thoroughly but never at the expense of the full-throttle narrative. Think of Keller as a similarly tortured, contemporary version of William Munny in Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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