Rhoades is a lawyer living in Carthage, NC...a outlying small town from Raleigh that is slowly becoming one of the trendy places for people who can afford the gas to drive to Raleigh or the business park here known as Research Triangle Park (so named cuz of the 3 corners of the triangle-Raleigh and NC State, Durham and Duke, Chapel Hill and UNC). I stumbled across him at a B/N reading one evening. This is his 4th novel. His first 3 followed a Wilmington NC (that's the eastern terminus of I-40 for you west coasters-better known as the hometown of Michael Jordan) bail skip tracer. The genre of book is a subspecialty of crime fiction termed redneck noir...in my book, that alone is reason for reading.
2 young Raleigh boys are kidnapped by a sex predator. a shadowy resident of the small town of Pine Lake spots the kids in a van, follows it to a decrepit trailer, blows the perp away then runs off. an intrepid reported tracks down the hero only to find out he doesn't want to be found. turns out he's an undercover FBI agent who disappeared off the grid 4 years earlier when a job went south. With the publicity, those bad guys, and i do mean bad guys, as well as the FBI, come back looking for him.
Before this group expanded, i had told WC Don about this author and as I recall from his comments, JD Rhoades wasn't going to be on his power rotation of authors. but he is for me. may be the locations, may be the red neck theme, may be the ridiculously high body count, I don't know, but I'm up to date on his books and will continue to stay that way. A- to B+ for me. 330 pages of a 5x8 book with, what seemed to me, wide margins so it went really quick.
gtg
East Coast Don
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