Finding Ricky

An undercover agent famed for taking out major bad guys, Cowboy now finds himself in a twilight world of shifting reality and surreal experience when he enters a special program under the direction of an unseen supervisor known only as "the Soup." Ostensibly, the program aims at helping him deal with declining performance brought about by the disappearance of his 13-year-old son Ricky, now a runaway hiding out in the lowly streets of the south side of town. The Soup tasks Cowboy with taking out Awesome and Scorpion, two high-level bad guys, but he soon suspects that the real target is the truth about the suicide of his wife eight years earlier, a horrifying event that Ricky witnessed and resulted in his troubled childhood. Cowboy hid the truth from everyone, including himself, but with the mysterious Soup stripping away layer after layer of his defenses, he can no longer conceal his role in her death-nor the impact it had on his son and himself. All is revealed in an explosive ending.

More than anything, Finding Ricky is a story about a spiritual intervention in Cowboy's life-the invisible and seemingly omniscient supervisor serving as a spirit guide not unlike the ghosts of past, present, and potential future of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. With Cowboy, the Soup-spirit uses, at times, exquisite kindness and unconditional love to give him an experience of what he has never known before; at other times, he sets Cowboy up for rough treatment intended to break up old patterns. The story works as a psychological thriller, but it is the spiritual interpretation that ties everything together.

Author Terrence Poppa has a background in journalism, private investigations, and Islamic studies. As a journalist, he wrote a biography of a Mexican drug trafficker: Drug Lord, the Life and Death of a Mexican Kingpin, now in its third edition. Netflix's Narcos producers purchased the dramatic rights in 2018 and made extensive use of the book for Seasons 1 and 2 of their Narcos: Mexico series. In addition to Finding Ricky, he has written two other thrillers, Gray Wrath, a sci-fi paranormal thriller, and Cauldron of Wrath, a terrorist thriller.