Thread of Hope

Jeff Shelby is another one of those prolific best-selling authors who has never been reviewed in this blog. He has written multiple series of crime/mystery novels. I stumbled into this very good book while I was on a trip in Southern Baja and found myself reading about my hometown area in and around San Diego.

Joe Tyler is the protagonist in this five-novel series, the first being Thread of Hope. This book opens as Joe is returning to his home for the first time in seven years. He grew up and went to high school in Coronado, an idyllic island community near downtown San Diego which is dominated by a military base. It used to be that mostly military families lived there, but it has evolved into a community of the very wealthy and it is a highly desirable place to live.

Joe is coming back because his best lifetime friend is in trouble. He has been accused of beating and raping an 18-year-old high school girl, Meredith Jordan, and then he was attacked and beaten by unknown assailants. Chuck Winslow lies in a hospital bed, unconscious, and it is not clear that he will survive this assault. Although Joe has been out of contact for eight years, he is very sure Chuck could not have done the things of which he is accused. As the story progresses we learn that Joe has fled the island in pursuit of his own daughter, Elizabeth, who had been kidnapped at the age of eight, right out of his front yard when he had taken his eyes off her for only a couple minutes. She disappeared without a trace. Joe had been working as a cop in Coronado, his dream job. He had been happy in his marriage and in love with his circumstances, and then his life was torn apart.

Over the course of the book, the reader learns that Joe left his job and spent a couple years doing nothing but searching for his daughter, but those years of grief were also spent in substance abuse. That was when his marriage came undone. As he emerged from his fearful depression and hopelessness, he realized that even if he had not been able to find Elizabeth, he had learned a lot about how to find people. He specialized in tracking down teenagers who disappeared from home, and he was damn good at it, having helped numerous families to reunite. It was only Chuck that could have pulled Joe back to Coronado where his painful memories were most vivid. With his police contacts in San Diego and with his own detective skills, he launched into figuring out what happened to Chuck.

At the outset of this book, I was not convinced it would be a good read. At first, it seemed a bit formulaic – just another crime story. But, it turns out that Shelby has written a story about a very compelling character in Joe Tyler. Joe’s struggle with his own losses was not melodramatic – it felt quite real. Shelby introduced a surrounding cast of characters that beautifully supported his story, and I knew I was hooked when I immediately downloaded the second book in this series, Thread of Suspicion. As suggested by the title of this first Joe Tyler book, there is some hope that Elizabeth might be alive, and as the first book ends, Joe gets a new clue that he has to follow. We at menreadingbooks.com have another excellent author with a large body of work to enjoy and write about.