Fortunate Son

June 25, 2018
In this overly complicated standalone from Rhoades (the Jack Keller series), Tyler Welch, a quarterback on his North Carolina high school football team, is taking an early morning jog when a stranger, who calls him Keith, forces him into a car at gunpoint before identifying himself as Tyler’s long-lost older brother, Mick. Meanwhile, a DEA agent and a deputy are set up in an abandoned house across the street from an informant, Savannah, and are listening to her being beaten by her lover, Charleyboy. They hope to get enough on Charleyboy to turn him against Wallace Luther, the target in a drug trafficking investigation. Savannah turns out to be the brothers’ mother, who lost custody of them years earlier when Tyler was too young to remember her and whose recent Facebook post led to Mick’s odyssey to reunite with her. The addition of a clichéd character—an honest cop seeking redemption for one professional lapse—only muddies the waters. Shifting awkwardly among the various plot lines, Rhoades fails to make readers care about any of the sprawling cast.

August 1, 2018
Rhoades has been resting his Keller series (Devils and Dust, 2015) for the last three years, but in the meantime, he's shown his versatility, first in the fine caper novel Ice Chest (2016) and now in this stand-alone thriller that mixes the pedal-to-the-metal narrative drive of the Keller novels with the quirky, Elmore Leonard-style characters who populated Ice Chest. Retired North Carolina county sheriff Wyatt McGee has always regretted being forced to separate two brothers, Mick and Keith, from their drug-addicted mother, Savannah. Keith, who was adopted, turned out fine (star athlete, good student, anticipating college), but the other brother dropped off the map?until now. Mick has a plan: the two brothers will reunite with their mom, whom he has tracked through Facebook to New Orleans. Keith isn't buying it, so Mick virtually kidnaps him, and so begins a bloody road trip that culminates with Wyatt?on the boys' trail?working to avert disaster with a Louisiana cop who has her own problems. Every character has a backstory here, and each is multifaceted, lives gone wrong but all with embers of humanity still smoldering. Another winner from a consistently strong writer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)