Niceville

April 23, 2012
Thriller author Stroud (Close Pursuit) begins this shoot ’em up meets supernatural thriller with a high-speed chase between cops, a getaway car, and a news chopper that is gruesomely cut short by a conspiring sniper. The bloodbath sets in motion a three-day flurry of dimly related events, including a standoff between an accused pedophile and a SWAT team, a father caught taping his daughters in the shower, and the takedown of an anonymous tipster for his own heinous crimes. As the entangled story unravels, “random stranger abductions” continue across the small Southern town of Niceville. After a missing boy is found alive in a fresh grave, clues surface about who—or what—is behind it all. In this unnecessarily convoluted mind-bender, Stroud introduces key players without sufficient backstory, making differentiation difficult. The genre jargon–thick prose can be campy (“Coker felt that line-of-duty death was like the jalapeños on a chimichanga; it added spice to patrol work that could be pretty damn boring most of the time”) and some plot twists, while intriguing, clutter rather than clarify. The ending leaves mysteries unsolved, but a pending follow-up book may provide answers, if readers are willing to return to Niceville. 100,000 announced first printing. Agent: Barney Karpfinger.

May 15, 2012
A tedious effort to create a gothically-tinged bestseller. Stroud's title is, of course, ironic, for a weird game's afoot in Niceville, Ga. Ten-year-old Rainey Teague has disappeared on his way home from school, and though a search party is dispatched, it is some time before he's found crying and locked inside a crypt in a local Confederate cemetery. The crypt belongs to Ethan Ruelle, who died in a duel on Christmas Eve in 1921. Even more bizarre is that shortly before his disappearance, a security camera picked up an image of Rainey looking into a mirror in the window of a curiosity shop--one second he's there, and the next he's vanished. Stroud next lurches us in a new direction by introducing Coker, Danziger and Zane, a trio of truly unsavory characters. While Danziger and Zane are trying to elude capture by the cops and news helicopter that are giving chase, Coker calmly shoots the cops and the helicopter pilot--four shots, four hits. It's clear he's no ordinary killer--his expertise emerges because he's in law enforcement himself. Meanwhile, Detective Nick Kavanaugh is trying to solve the mysterious disappearance--and even more mysterious reappearance--of the now-catatonic Rainey. Nick's wife, Kate, a lawyer, is concerned about her husband's preoccupation with the case and consults her father, a professor at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va., who has an immediate suspicion about the magical potency of the mirror that had so fascinated Rainey. Stroud follows the bestseller party line in which when one doesn't quite know what to do, one throws in a new character, preferably one with a self-consciously clever name (like police officer Mavis Crossfire). Stroud manages to make his mysterious and violent doings both banal and vapid.

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January 1, 2012

In the paradoxically ominous-sounding Niceville, somewhere in the Deep South, little Rainey Teague disappears in a flash--right in front of the security cameras. Det. Nick Kavanaugh and wife Kate, a family-practice lawyer, soon discover that there's an ancient, evil power at work. Stroud's latest is booming; rights have been sold to eight countries, and there's a 100,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2012
Niceville is the epitome of a small, picturesque southern townbrick homes, sun-dappled streets, shade trees dripping moss, river mist cooling the air. Unfortunately, its population isn't equally pleasant, as demonstrated early on when a greedy cop, complicit in a bank robbery, dispatches four fellow officers in a brutal (almost gleeful) ambush. If that's not enough, during the course of a mere 36 hours, an abusive husband with a thirst for vengeance outs a father who has taken compromising pictures of his daughters; the corrupt, racist owner of a security company gets his comeuppance from a beleaguered employee; and a young boy vanishes only to turn up, alive, in a long-sealed tomb. Is it all foreordained by dark forces emanating from past wrongs? Stroud's combination of the supernatural with the hyperrealistic never quite jells, but, on balance, he literally gives plenty of bang for the buck. A generous collection of memorable villains, tight action sequences, and an occasional bit of black humor are enough to keep readers turning pages.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)