Just in case you’re wondering, we’ll be re-running some of our best and most popular book reviews every other week from now on.  They will be described as our Legacy Mysterious Book Reports.  Send us a quick request if you have a favorite that you’d like to see again and we’ll do our best to re-publish it.

Legacy Mysterious Book Report No. 24

Published February 6, 2017

Nothing Short of Dying

Mysterious Book Report No. 310

by John Dwaine McKenna

We’re excited here at the MBR, to bring you part I of an event that only comes along once in a blue moon and is scarcer than two-buck Chuck at a gang-banger’s ball.  It’s our awesome two-fer . . . just like the five-to-seven happy  hour at the  He Ain’t Here Lounge . . . we’re giving ya two for the price of one and doing the same author two weeks in a row!

The first, Nothing Short of Dying (Simon and Schuster, PB $9.99, 392 pages, ISBN 978-1-5011-6073-8), by Erik Storey is one of the most exciting debut novels that the MBR has ever reviewed.  It introduces a character named Clyde Barr who’s part mountain man, part mercenary and part American hero.  After serving a short prison sentence in Mexico and being away from his beloved western home for sixteen years, world traveler and freedom fighter Clyde Barr makes it back to the USA, where he is decompressing, by himself, in the western Colorado wilderness, out near the Utah border.  He’s enjoying a venison dinner by the campfire when he gets a panicked cell phone call from his sister Jen.  Frantically, she begs him for help.   The last thing she says is, They’re going to kill me . . . and then the phone goes dead.  So begins the first chapter of a desperate search for the sometimes drug addicted sister he hasn’t seen in more than a decade.  Having no other alternative, Clyde begins by looking in the western Colorado village that he grew up in, and swore he’d never go back to.  That’s where he meets Allie.  She’s the woman who’ll change his life, and make a stand with him, fighting a host of drug lords and their henchmen.  Clyde doesn’t know where his sister’s being held, by whom, or how he’s going to rescue her.  He only knows that nothing short of dying will prevent him from saving her.  The non-stop action begins on page one and carries through to the stunning end of this electrifying novel.  Clyde Barr is a character all crime-fiction enthusiasts are going to want to be in touch with.  The MBR, like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, “Is gonna keep an eye on this guy.” Author Erik Storey is a natural-born storyteller and world-class talent who’ll keep us all engrossed, entertained and enthused for a long, long time! Oh yeah.  He’s just that good . . .

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