The Dispatcher: A Novel - Softcover

Jahn, Ryan David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143120700 ISBN 13: 9780143120704

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2011

Synopsis

*Soon to be a six-part Apple TV+ series starring Patrick Brammell of Colin from Accounts*

From the author of the award-winning debut crime novel Good Neighbors--a white-knuckle thriller about the lengths a man will go to for his daughter

The phone rings. It's your daughter. She's been dead for four months.

So begins East Texas police dispatcher Ian Hunt's fight to get his daughter back. The call is cut off by the man who snatched her from her bedroom seven years ago, and a basic description of the kidnapper is all Ian has to go on. What follows is a bullet-strewn cross-country chase from Texas to California along Interstate 10- a wild ride in a 1965 Mustang that passes through the outlaw territory of No Country for Old Men and is shot through with moments of macabre violence that call to mind the novels of Thomas Harris.

About this title

About the Author

Ryan David Jahn grew up in Arizona, Texas, and California. He left school at sixteen to work in a record store and subsequently joined the army. Since 2004 he has worked in television and film. His first novel, Good Neighbors, won the Crime Writers' Association John Creasy (New Blood) Dagger Award. Jahn lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Mary.

Reviews

Ian Hunt, balding and big-bellied, is a chair jockey in a small-town police department in East Texas. He answers the phone and sometimes dispatches a cop car, but mostly he plays computer solitaire and mourns his daughter, who disappeared years ago. That mystery—Was it abduction? Or murder?—has cored out his life. His wife ditched him. He’s estranged from his son. He inhales Guinness. Then his daughter calls. She’s escaped her abductor; can Daddy rescue her from the bad man? It isn’t that easy. But Hunt is on the trail. The rest of the book is so luridly violent that the publisher’s comparisons to Tarantino and the Coen brothers seem perfectly appropriate. The writing has a sensory feel—the texture of a dress, the gurgle of a drain—but Jahn gets a little carried away, as when he revels in descriptions of body stink, of flicking belly-button lint and washing in saliva (somebody else’s). Still, the chases, the gun battles, and the images of a sun-blasted land add up to a stunning read. But not before dinner. --Don Crinklaw

Edition details

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0143120700
• ISBN 13: 9780143120704
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 368