Review: Another John Ray Winner
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 17, 2013
It's a welcome return to the world of John Ray, son of a retired mobster, the white sheep of the family. He has no desire for that life, but keeps getting drawn back in. He'd been standing beside his brother when the shots took his life. He'd help find the real killer when a friend had been accused. Lanny Bride, who now ran his father's old business, the real business, also wanted the killer found.His Father, Tony, the victim of several hear attacks, lives in a retirement home.John gets called out of his bed, delightfully filled with a gorgeous redhead, and asked to find another killer by Bride. The victim is an older man, Roberto Swales, an ex-boxer who'd worked for his father and now presumably for Bride. He was Duct-taped to a chair with bullets in each leg and one arm. What had killed him, though, was the beating his head had taken from a champagne bottle, enough blows to shatter the skull. John remembers Swales from when he was a boy.He begins his investigation and soon gets a connection to a twenty year old bombing, when the young John was on the other side of the world, New Zealand, pursuing a young woman. A bombing that haunted to this day for the scene of a young father bringing his two week old son out of the building, dead in his arms.We have an ex-Irish terrorist killed first, then Swales. What did they have in common? Both had been interviewed by the redheaded bed mate of John's mentioned earlier. She was a writer doing a book on John's father Tony.John soon has the cops interested in him once again. They'd never believed he was straight, even when Baron, the lead cop on John's early investigation, got all the credit for what John had uncovered.Quite liked this one. Again told in present tense, I found myself engrossed again in the story. Ready for more John Ray.Strongly recommended, both this one and the first, HOPE ROAD.