Staff Reviews

I’m guessing when Nick Petrie talks to fans, a lot of them want to know when we’re going to read more about Lewis’s backstory. Well, here it is! Lewis’s former buddy Teddy has been living in the Northwoods, trying to achieve a normal life. But wouldn’t you know it, his therapist-lover blabs to another guy she’s sleeping with, and wouldn’t you know it, he has ties to a crime syndicate that knows that Teddy’s stories of the Ghost Killers, who are so legendary that there’s a quarter-million-dollar bounty on bringing the gang in alive. The Ghost Killers do indeed kill, but they have a code not unlike Dexter, the serial killer of serial killers – only the extreme baddies, only when necessary. This endangers the life not just of Lewis and the gang, but everyone they love, and that includes Peter Ash and June, once they decide to help out, which of course they do. This is one of the more brutal entries in the series, and though I consider myself to have a delicate stomach for these sorts of things, I couldn’t stop reading!

Here’s something I love: a good, thriller-y crime novel with the speed, the swagger, and the vibes of a 90s action flick. Petrie does it right! The setup: reluctant solver-of-problems-that-no-one-else-can-solve Peter Ash and his best bud and (often literal but sometimes just metaphorical) partner in crime Lewis are trying to hunker down all quiet and warm with their families in their cozy Milwaukee neighborhood during a freezing Midwestern February. But when a crime syndicate threatens to air out Lewis’s dirty laundry from his ‘bad old days’ as the ringleader of the country’s former foremost crew of murderers-of-murderers, well, plans change. Houses explode. Computers are hacked. Doors are kicked in. The bullets (and knockout darts!) fly. Along the way, our heroes have to ask themselves some tough questions – does their moral code really make them different from the baddies they’re chasing? Can doing bad things for good reasons ever really be right, or are we perhaps just grasping for rationalizations? Here’s one thing that’s sure: Petrie’s books are best when he writes his heroes into lousy weather. There’s just something about that classic man vs the elements vs teams of hired killers story that Petrie has perfected. This one’s a high-tension page turner where the fists are flying fast as the ice and snow.