Assume Nothing

September 5, 2011
In this brutal stand-alone from Haywood (Cemetery Road), former Florida cop Joe Reddick relocates to Los Angeles following the trauma of discovering his wife and two children slaughtered in their home. Nine years later, a minor car accident involving a careless driver with something to hide, Andy Baumhower, precipitates a similar threat to Reddick’s new wife and son, Dana and Jake. Reddick, determined to eliminate the threat by whatever means necessary, goes after Baumhower and his three business partners, who are trying to cover both a kidnapping gone bad and a $250,000 debt to sadistic Mexican drug boss Ruben Lizama. In a battle of wits and violence, Reddick is constantly on the verge of going berserk. The action takes plenty of suspenseful twists toward the showdown. This is as dark as Haywood’s Aaron Gunner series (All the Lucky Ones Are Dead, etc.), but the tortured Reddick is a much less likable character.

October 1, 2011
A volatile man gets pushed to the wall once too often. One night nine years ago, Joe Reddick of the West Palm Beach Police Department came home to find his wife and children slaughtered by an intruder. His fellow cops caught the perp, but Joe's nightmares raged on, so he decided to make himself a new life in Los Angeles. Although Joe could escape West Palm, however, he couldn't escape himself, and now Dana, his second wife, is about to divorce him and take their son Jake, 5, because she can't trust his volcanic temper. That temper will be sorely tried after Joe's car is sideswiped by a van whose driver, Andy Baumhower, is jittery because he's been charged with getting rid of the corpse of Gillis Rainey, the squirrelly financial advisor Baumhower and his three associates in Class Act Productions—Perry Cross, Ben Clarke and Will Sinnott—had kidnapped in a futile attempt to get him to pay back the $100,000 he'd taken from them before they had to repay their even bigger debt to druglord Jorge Lizama, Jr. Naturally, the Class Act partners feel they can't risk the chance that Reddick might remember his brush with Baumhower at the wrong moment and go to the cops. But Clarke picks exactly the wrong way of insuring that he won't: breaking into his home and threatening him and his wife and son. Reddick, who has no intention of losing a second family to violence, decides to take matters into his own hands, and by the time the curtain comes down, the cast will have been decimated, much to the gentle reader's righteous satisfaction. An efficient noir actioner that's also a sharp study of a hero who "wasn't an evil man, just an astoundingly unfortunate one.".

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

December 1, 2011
Here's another gripping stand-alone (following Cemetery Road, 2010) from the talented author of the Aaron Gunner series. Joe Reddick's worst nightmares have a terrible way of coming true. First, the Miami cop lost his wife and child at the hands of a home invader; now, years later, with Reddick remarried and settled in Los Angeles, the nightmare threatens to repeat itself. It starts with a simple fender bender, except that the driver of the car that runs into Reddick has just dumped a dead body in the L.A. River and is worried that Reddick will put two and two together eventually. One of his accomplices has the idea to threaten Reddick's new wife and son. A very bad idea, as it turns out. All his pent-up fury unleashed, Reddick becomes a revenge machine, willing to do anything, kill anybody, to protect his second family. Haywood sets up the premise skillfully, and he has plenty of surprises in his bag of tricks, turning the plot on its heel just when we think we know where it's going. There's also a stellar supporting cast of Elmore Leonardstyle goofballs, both lethal and comically banal. A fine thriller from a first-rate writer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)