Here and Gone

April 17, 2017
Audra Kinney, the heroine of this suspenseful but deeply disturbing thriller from Beck (the pseudonym of Irish author Stuart Neville), is fleeing from New York to California with her two kids to prevent her abusive ex from getting custody. One minute Audra is submitting to what seems a routine traffic stop in an Arizona backwater, the next she’s in a cell facing charges of marijuana possession with intent to distribute, 10-year-old Sean and six-year-old Louise have disappeared, and Sheriff Ronald Whiteside insists that no children were in the car when he pulled her over. When the story hits the media, the only person who credits Audra’s frantic claims that the last she saw of her kids was Whiteside’s ordering a deputy to drive them away to “somewhere safe” is a stranger, San Francisco gang member Danny “Knife Boy” Lee—because he’s convinced something similar happened to his wife and daughter five years earlier. The narrative drive more than compensates for sometimes inconsistent and less-than-convincing characters, though Audra and her children’s plight may upset some readers. Agent: Nat Sobel, Sobel Weber Associates.

July 31, 2017
This new novel by Beck (a pen name of Irish crime novelist Stuart Neville) begins with Audra Kinney on the run with her two children, escaping an abusive husband and monstrous mother-in-law. While driving through Arizona, she gets pulled over by local sheriff Bob Whiteside, for what seems like a routine traffic stop. He arrests her on a fake drugs charge, knocks her around in a cell, and tries to convince her that she was alone when arrested. When the media get wind of the case, Whiteside easily manipulates them into demonizing Audra as a crazy person who’s killed her children and hidden their bodies. The soft-spoken, ultracool Danny Lee, an ex–hit man for a San Francisco tong whose late wife suffered a fate very similar to Audra’s, is a frighteningly self-contained good-bad guy who gives both Audra and this riveting thriller new hope for justice. The novel is rife with highly emotional moments, and actor-narrator Craden performs them with full intensity, matching Beck’s descriptions of Audra’s overwhelming unhappiness and lack of self-esteem at home and her sense of empowerment leading to her breakaway. Trapped by Whiteside, she gives vent to frustration, fear, and fury. The quick-to-anger sheriff is full of smarmy good-ole-boy charm (with an accent to match) when dealing with the press, but there are moments when he can’t keep his self-loathing under wraps. A Crown hardcover.