The Prophet
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4.4 • 22 Ratings
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
Adam Austin hasn't spoken to his brother in years. When they were teenagers, their sister was abducted and murdered, and their devastated family never recovered. Now Adam keeps to himself, scraping by as a bail bondsman, working so close to the town's criminal fringes that he sometimes seems a part of them.
Kent Austin is the beloved coach of the local high school football team, a religious man and hero in the community. After years of near misses, Kent's team has a shot at the state championship, a welcome point of pride in a town that has had its share of hardships.
Just before playoffs begin, the town and the team are thrown into shock when horrifically, impossibly, another teenage girl is found murdered. As details emerge that connect the crime to the Austin brothers, the two must confront their buried rage and grief-and unite to stop a killer.
Michael Koryta, widely hailed as one of the most exciting thriller authors at work today, has written his greatest novel ever -- an emotionally harrowing, unstoppably suspenseful novel that Donald Ray Pollock has called "one of the sharpest and superbly plotted crime novels I've read in my life."
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
After three supernatural thrillers, Thriller Award finalist Koryta (The Ridge) triumphantly returns to crime fiction with this multilayered exploration of guilt and redemption. A momentary lapse has haunted bail bondsman Adam Austin all his life. Some two decades earlier, in his hometown of Chambers, Ohio, the then 18-year-old Adam chose to hang out with his latest love-interest one day rather than walk his 16-year-old sister, Marie Lynn, the five blocks home from school. A predator abducted Marie Lynn and killed her. Since then a gulf has existed between Austin and his then 15-year-old brother, Kent. Old wounds reopen after Adam unintentionally sends another teenage girl, Rachel Bond, to her death. The parallel events compel him to vow to not only catch but kill the person responsible. That Rachel's boyfriend happens to be the star receiver for the Chambers high school football team coached by Kent forces the brothers to reconnect. Like Laura Lippman, Koryta has a gift for melding a suspenseful, twisty plot with a probing, unflinching look at his protagonists' weaknesses.
