Thursday, October 01, 2015

The Grid -- Harry Hunsicker

In the first two novels featuring Jon Cantrell, he was a free-lance law-enforcement contractor for the Feds.  He left quite a lot of damage and quite a few bodies behind, but he got the jobs done.  Now he's serving as sheriff in a small Central Texas town,  but his problems are a lot different from the ones faced by Sheriff Dan Rhodes (a personal favorite of mine).  Rhodes has to deal with runaway bulls, pigs, and donkeys, plus the occasional murder, whereas Cantrell finds himself faced with the murder of one of his deputies, a deputy who is, admittedly, a terrible person, but that doesn't matter.  Murder is murder.  

Almost as soon as Cantrell starts working on the murder, Cantrell is roped into working with the Feds again because someone's trying to take out the regional power grid.  Terrorists?  That's what some people would like to believe.  Cantrell also has personal problems.  The woman he loves has taken their daughter and gone off to parts unknown.

What Cantrell doesn't know, but the readers do, is that the death of his deputy came at the hands of a serial killer (one of two female serial killers in the novel), who's connected to a very wealthy family.  

And speaking of connections, did you think that the two cases, the murder and the power grid destruction, were connected?  Well, you were right, but I'm not going to spoil things by telling you how and why.

Hunsicker tells the story smoothly written first- and third-person sections, and it zips right along.  Plenty of action, one heck of an explosion, lots of shooting, some sex, and even some humor.  You gotta love a book that homages one of the best lines from Road House.  

You don't have to have read the first two books in the series to enjoy this one.  Check it out.

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