Already Gone - Softcover

John Rector

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1612180876 ISBN 13: 9781612180878

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer, 2011

Synopsis

2012 International Thriller Award Nominee

Jake Reese is a writing teacher at an American university. He lives in a small brick Tudor close to campus with his art buyer wife, Diane. His life is quiet--even ordinary. And he likes it that way. But it wasn’t always quiet. In Jake’s distant past was a life on the streets, inflicting damage and suffering on more people than he can count. And now someone from his past, it seems, has come looking for him.

A raw, gripping thriller about the price paid for past sins, John Rector’s third novel is a live wire that crackles with the intensity of a man who has nothing left to lose. When two men attack Jake in a parking lot and cut off his ring finger, he tries to dismiss it as an unlucky case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But when events take a more sinister turn and Diane goes missing, Jake knows he can no longer hide from the truth. As he embarks on a mission to find his wife, he realizes his dark past is refusing to stay buried, and that his future is about to unfold in ways he could never have imagined.

With taut and brooding prose, Rector paints a formidable portrait of a reformed man’s slow descent into a life he thought he had walked away from forever. As the intensity becomes almost unbearable, the pace quickens and the suspense applies an unrelenting, vicelike grip, as Already Gone hurtles toward its ultimate explosive climax.

About this title

About the Author

John Rector is the #1 bestselling author of The Grove, Lost Things, The Cold Kiss, and the International Thriller Award Nominated Already Gone. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and won several awards including the Porterhouse Prize.

He lives in Omaha, Nebraska.

Reviews

Jake Reese thought he had put his troubled past behind him. Then two men violently attack him in the parking lot of a bar and cut off his finger. Suddenly, his quiet existence as a writing teacher at a small college looks to be in jeopardy. He has just married the love of his life, and they live in a beautiful Tudor not far from campus. Jack doesn’t want to believe that the peacefulness he has worked so hard to create could disappear in an instant, but the police are not exactly inspiring confidence that the assailants will be caught. Despite his better instincts, Jake is seriously thinking of reaching out to the hard-core criminal who mentored him as a young man and, he is convinced, would find the culprits ASAP. In his third novel (after The Grove, 2010), Rector keeps his plot churning and his prose lean in a narrative that contains both riveting forward momentum and an unsettling view of marriage and friendship. The writing is ever so stylish, and the characters are deeply flawed—an irresistible combination.— Joanne Wilkinson

In Rector’s third novel (after The Grove and The Cold Kiss), newly hired young English professor Jake Reese and his wife, an art buyer, have been married only a month, and there is a great deal they don’t know about each other’s past—to a dangerous extent. When two thugs attack Jake and cut off his ring finger, he is horrified and bewildered, finally seeking help from a foster uncle with apparent mob connections. Further death threats confuse him, and then his wife dies in a car accident.......More developments come to light, involving diamonds, hijacking, betrayals, and murder. VERDICT The suspense and plot twists are gripping. While the first-person, present-tense narration and oddly unsatisfying ending give the work a pulp-fiction air, it also has that genre’s appealing raw action, cliff-hanging chapter endings, and graphic, cinematic drama. In spite of its flaws, this one is hard to put down.—Roland Person, formerly with Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale

Edition details

• Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1612180876
• ISBN 13: 9781612180878
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 316