No Prisoners by Ellis Blake

The proverbial happy family living a comfortable life in the wooded mountains outside of Santa Fe. Hannah and Adam Lyon are PhD physicists. She is the breadwinner working in a private research organization. Adam may also have the degree but is lacking is something else. Drive? Ambition? He'd tried for some time to solve an unsolvable equation in physics (the Yang-Mills equation. It's real. Look it up. Way way way above my paygrade. Even Sheldon Cooper would be stumped) before giving up on physics and his career. In looking for other work he ended in construction. They have a 10yo son, Adam, who is a Type 1 diabetic. We don't learn much about Adam's background. Hannah's background? Yuck. Abusive father and submissive mom. Father continually beat up his wife and had no qualms about telling Adam he was a total loser who didn't deserve Hannah. 

Life in the Lyon household was going along OK until it wasn't. Adam just up and disappeared. No clues. No warnings. Just here today. Gone tomorrow. Without a trace. Police assume basic domestic issues. Guy got fed up and just left to find something, anything, better. 

Hannah isn't convinced. Lou Hunt is the detective who caught the case. He's a late-career Santa Fe police detective with a heart problem. Married with an adult daughter. He thinks Adam either bolted or got caught up in some criminal activity, drugs or human trafficking, and got his just rewards. And Hunt has issues of his own that he isn't proud of and must eventually make amends with his family.  

Not Hannah. Adam's been missing for 5-6 weeks when book begins. She constantly badgers the police who've effectively written her off. Except for Hunt. He'll al least talk with her about possible theories and continually pesters Hannah to tell him every possible scenario for a connection. Even back to her father who, mysteriously, also just up and disappeared a few years earlier. Hunt now ends up with two missing persons cases. 

Hannah's inability to let it go, that he's just gone, ends up making her paranoid when she repeatedly sees a red Jeep Cherokee following her around. As they say, you're not being paranoid if someone really is following. Returning from an outing, she finds her home has been broken into. Whoever did quite the job on her house. She looks high and low for anything that could be missing. Nothing. 

After searching every square inch of the hillside house, she ventures underneath the deck to check on the crawlspace that was unopened and undisturbed. But she also notices that a few of the overhead joists have been sealed. She pries open one seal and finds neatly stacked bundles roughly the size of a paperback. Odd. She pulls one out, tears off the paper and finds bundles of $100 bills. Pulling out all the bundles, she has discovered a whopping $3.9 million. Only reason to find that kind of money has to be drugs. 

Up until now, the story has been plodding along. Now the story skips into high gear. Hannah won't tell the cops because they think she's loony. She's got the money that means she's got some leverage. So she takes the investigation on herself. Think about that. An amateur with a bundle of cash (which someone is really gonna want to get back), a mostly disinterested police force, a missing husband, and a diabetic  child. 

Prepare for multiple twists (might help to keep a notepad nearby to keep track) over the last quarter of the book. 

The 'about the author' blurb says that Ellis Blake is a pseudonym for a NZ-based writer with nine mysteries to his credit but not much else. What I can say is that once Hannah uncovers the cash, the book really does abruptly accelerate to a breathtaking pace with most (but not all) issues being resolved without a tidy storybook happy ending. Have to say, I found Blake's writing style to be right up my alley. Lean, aggressive and sparse without a lot of unnecessary narrative clogging up the story. Pretty sure I'll be checking the library for any of his earlier eight books. 

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance reader copy. Publication date is 21 July 2026. 

 

ECD