Gone 'til November

May 3, 2010
Karen White’s lugubrious opening tones are fitting introduction to our harried protagonist: Sara Cross, St. Charles County, Fla., deputy sheriff and single mother of a six-year-old boy with leukemia. She’s first on the scene after fellow deputy (and former lover) Billy Flynn has shot and killed a 22-year-old New Jersey black man for fleeing a traffic stop. Sara senses something off about the shooting, and her investigation eventually leads to a confrontation with Morgan, an elderly, extremely proficient yet oddly humane hit man who is suffering from newly diagnosed cancer. These two well-drawn characters are the heart of the novel, and Karen White’s somber, serious performance admirably brings them both to life. A Minotaur hardcover (Reviews, Nov. 2).

Starred review from November 2, 2009
Tormented lives brutally intersect in Stroby's powerful thriller, the possible first in a new series to feature Sara Cross, the lone woman sheriff's deputy in Florida's St. Charles County. One night, Cross, a single mother who's coping with her son's leukemia and the remnants of a two-years-gone postdivorce fling with fellow deputy Billy Flynn, arrives on the edge of a cypress swamp where Flynn has just shot a 22-year-old black man from New Jersey allegedly fleeing a traffic stop. Sara tries to smother her still-simmering lust for no-good Billy, but her cop instincts drive her toward a dismaying truth that hurtles her into a violent showdown with an aging New Jersey contract killer stricken with a rare cancer. While relentlessly probing the eternal mystery of why bright and capable women fall for dangerous losers, Stroby (The Heartbreak Lounge
) explores moral choices that leave his devastatingly real characters torn between doing nothing and risking everything.