Gone 'til November-Wallace Stroby

Gone 'til November
Wallace Stroby
Minotaur, Jan 19 2010, $24.99
ISBN 9780312560249

In St. Charles County, Florida Deputy Sheriff Sara Cross is the first to arrive at the deserted highway where her former lover and current law enforcement partner Deputy Sheriff Billy Flynn killed a twenty-two years old black man from New Jersey. Flynn says he stopped the victim for running a stop sign. However, the badly shaken cop says the man pulled out a gun and refused to put it down so he shot him. The single mother of a child stricken with leukemia, Sara believes him not because she still wants Billy, which she does; but because the dead man had a gun in his hand and a trunk loaded with weapons.

Drug dealer Mikey-Mike sends his aging torpedo Morgan to learn why his deal in Florida has not been commenced. Suffering from cancer, Morgan sees this as an opportunity for an easy final payday before he retires. Sara investigates the apparently justified homicide while Morgan makes his own scrutiny of the situation. Soon their separate inquiries will crash.

The key to this fast-paced police procedural thriller is real people make real choices; often real bad ones. Sara and Morgan are super leads holding their respective subplot together until they converge into a terrific story line. The support cast in Jersey and Florida enhance the powerful tale as Wallace Stroby makes a profound case that being human means frequently making poor decisions even at times knowing the consequential outcome, but unwisely doing so anyway.

Harriet Klausner