Review: Exciting, Fast Paced Short Story
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 13, 2013
Rattled, by Jude Hardin, is a thrilling, well-crafted short story that packs quite a punch in a little over 20 pages. The story features Hardin's series protagonist Nicholas Colt, who happens to be celebrating his 50th birthday and is on a routine shopping trip when he picks up a seemingly harmless older hitchhiker. Bad move. He is soon taken captive by the hitchhiker who has him drive to a remote location in the woods. Let's just say that things get worse from there.Colt is a private investigator of sorts, but Hardin is very careful to make him a credibly flawed person and not a James Bond-type super hero. During the course of the story, he does some things that aren't the world's smartest to make his predicament worse, which allows Hardin to play a guessing game with the reader as to just how Colt is going to get out of the mess. Then, he shows off considerable resourcefulness in getting himself out of trouble (no spoiler here; Colt narrates the story). Within the boundaries of this type of fiction, I found the plot to be surprisingly credible.This story should be equally entertaining for fans of the series or those, such as myself, who hadn't read a Colt tale before. It serves as a good introduction to the character, but Hardin carefully mixes in the backstory a little bit at a time so the plot doesn't get bogged down in giving readers too many details about Colt's background. Instead, we get drawn into Colt's increasingly dangerous, and increasingly suspenseful, cat-and-mouse game with a hitchhiker who is very good at what he's doing. The dialogue is a bit forced in the last half of the story in a needless effort to make the villain seem even more bizarre, but readers will remain hooked until the very end.The only possible drawback for this story is the price. I got the story as part of a free promotion, but it apparently lists at 99 cents. If readers don't mind paying a buck for an exciting, half-hour 25-page read, I highly recommend this story.