Adam Colclough lives and works in the West Midlands, he writes regularly for a number of websites, one day he will get round to writing a book for someone else to review.
Having quit his job as a coroner to become a private investigator Clay Edison is hired by a young man trying to tidy up the affairs of his late mother.
Working the case, he uncovers a property scam targeting vulnerable people that has been selling the same plots on which to build a dream home for decades. The plots are all located near to a town in a one-horse town in the Californian wilderness. Swan’s Flat may only have a handful of residents, but their determination to keep their secrets makes its streets as mean as those of Los Angeles.
Farther and son team Jonathan and Jessie Kellerman have returned with another superior thriller. There is more than a touch of the old time western in this story of a lone man riding into a dusty town looking for the truth and finding a gun barrel pointing his way.
As ever the characterization is scalpel sharp, and the authors make brilliant use of the atmospheric landscape of the flip side of the sunshine state. There is also a subtext about the way the dream of owning property in some unspoilt Eden is used to part vulnerable from their hard-earned money by people with tongues more forked than that of the serpent.
There can sometimes be a tension in a novel with two authors as their styles, unconsciously work against each other. Not here, this exciting, powerful and thoughtful book is the product of a grand master and a rising star of the genre working in perfect unison.
