Down the Broken Road

August 6, 2018
Backlund’s disappointing sequel to 2017’s Among the Dead finds former North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation special agent Rachel Carver, who quit the SBI after she shot and killed a murder suspect, Lauren Bailey, in self-defense, searching for work as a private investigator. A call from a Siler City detective interrupts Carver’s job search: her friend Bryce Parker, a Raleigh Herald reporter, is in the hospital recovering from a near-fatal heroin overdose. Someone kidnapped Parker, she learns, and injected him with the drug. Related events involving drugs, a recovery center, a scandalous affair, and a growing body count follow, all weighed down by increasingly flat prose. Meanwhile, Carver discovers a link between the deaths of Bailey and her former boyfriend, platoon leader Sgt. Tyler Larson, with a military cover-up in Afghanistan. Backlund supplies a surfeit of forgettable supporting characters, but readers who admire strong female leads will want to see more of the intriguing Carver. Agent: Rachel Ekstrom Courage, Folio Literary Management.

August 15, 2018
A former cop adjusts to a new career while guilt from her past hangs on.Rachel Carver left her job as a star homicide detective with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation when she was forced to kill a murder suspect she now believes to have been innocent. Her freelance work includes helping Danny Braddock, her former partner from the Raleigh Police Department, where she worked before the SBI, solve a complicated case (Among the Dead, 2017). While she waits to see if she's landed a job as an investigator for a Raleigh law firm, she gets a game-changing call. Reporter Bryce Parker, who appears to have overdosed on heroin, has asked for Rachel. When she gets to the hospital, he tells her, "You were right. I knew all along...you were right," before falling fast asleep. Suddenly the law firm wants to know whether she's willing to take another look at the case of drugs and Afghanistan veterans that caused her so much pain at the SBI. Although a man named Kyle Strickland has been arrested for killing another of the vets involved, the firm has an unnamed client who believes Strickland is innocent and thinks his case is related to Rachel's former case. When Parker, the reporter, gets out of the hospital, he and Ramirez, the cop who found him overdosing in the ditch to which someone apparently dragged him, tell Rachel that Parker's found a witness to the original murder, a young boy too scared to talk. Before they even leave Ramirez's house, they're attacked by a very large man who kills Parker and Ramirez with Rachel's gun, knocks Rachel out, and leaves her in her car with "the murder weapon in her lap." Rachel is in deep trouble now, and Danny Braddock is the only one she trusts to help. Refusing to surrender until she works the case herself, she gets a friend who's a crime scene tech to collect all the evidence from her car, clothes, and body while she goes on a wild, dangerous hunt to find the killer as she evades her former colleagues.Backlund's kick-ass heroine is just the person to clear up her own mistakes if she can only stay ahead of a dangerous conspiracy.

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September 15, 2018
When reporter Bryce Parker is revived after an apparent overdose, the first person he asks to see is former North Carolina Bureau of Investigation agent Rachel Carver. Rachel drives across the state to his bedside and learns that Bryce has a source who can crack open the case that ended Rachel's career with the bureau. Unfortunately, whoever shot him up with heroin and left him for dead doesn't want that story told. As Rachel picks up the investigation on her own, the body count rises?and Rachel begins to look like a suspect. Along the way, there are double crosses, conspiracies, and a trip to Asheville to get support from Rachel's former police-department partner. This compelling series (this installment follows Among the Dead, 2017) will have fans of Alafair Burke and Karin Slaughter delighted to follow another such female protagonist.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)