Niceville
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
When ten-year-old Rainey Teague disappears on his way home from school in idyllic Niceville, Detective Nick Kavanaugh traces the boy to his last sighting - staring into the window of old pawn shop in town. CCTV shows Rainey there one minute and then gone the next. In the days that follow, any hope Rainey's family has of finding him alive starts to fade but then Rainey is found - alive but in a coma, and there's no telling when, or if, he'll ever wake up...
One year on, Kavanagh is still haunted by the case. And now another member of the town - this time an elderly woman - has been reported missing. It's as though she vanished into thin air. Once again, Kavanagh's on the case and, as he starts to dig back through the town's history, he can't help but notice that Niceville has a much higher than average number of stranger abductions...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Thriller author Stroud (Close Pursuit) begins this shoot 'em up meets supernatural thriller with a high-speed chase between cops, a getaway car, and a news chopper that is gruesomely cut short by a conspiring sniper. The bloodbath sets in motion a three-day flurry of dimly related events, including a standoff between an accused pedophile and a SWAT team, a father caught taping his daughters in the shower, and the takedown of an anonymous tipster for his own heinous crimes. As the entangled story unravels, "random stranger abductions" continue across the small Southern town of Niceville. After a missing boy is found alive in a fresh grave, clues surface about who or what is behind it all. In this unnecessarily convoluted mind-bender, Stroud introduces key players without sufficient backstory, making differentiation difficult. The genre jargon thick prose can be campy ("Coker felt that line-of-duty death was like the jalape os on a chimichanga; it added spice to patrol work that could be pretty damn boring most of the time") and some plot twists, while intriguing, clutter rather than clarify. The ending leaves mysteries unsolved, but a pending follow-up book may provide answers, if readers are willing to return to Niceville. 100,000 announced first printing.
