Parting Shot: A Thriller

Parting Shot: A Thriller by Stone, Jonathan. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780312354107.

Local television reporter Sam Stevens is consumed by his failing marriage and, more than that, by the psychological harm his wife is doing to their ten-year-old son. As Sam covers a once-in-a-lifetime story---one that has turned Webster County into bedlam but is at last providing Sam with an opportunity for media stardom---he suddenly sees an even better chance: to solve his personal problems forever. But there’s another player thrust into the national spotlight along with Sam: It’s Sheriff Billy Wyatt, who’s in way over his head. The FBI is breathing down his neck, and the national press highlights his every bungle. He’s confronting a madman---and his own limits. Can he outsmart either? Out of elements that thriller readers have come to expect, Jonathan Stone has woven a story they assuredly will not expect. In whirlwind action and hurricane prose that echo the best of James Patterson and Harlan Coben, Stone is in top form here, delivering a tale about the unchecked power of the media and the unreasonable passions of fatherhood---with a payoff that will stun and startle, yet make perfect sense. Parting Shot is a shot of adrenaline. It’s a bullet that rotates wildly till it finds its target---deep in the reader’s imagination. It’s the latest work from a writer whose fiction Ian Rankin has hailed as “prime entertainment” and T. Jefferson Parker has called “clever, bold, and a little nasty.”