First Shot

A Grant Fletcher Thriller

By: John Ryder

Narrated by: Nick Landrum

Fans of high-octane action and unforgettable heroes like Lee Child’s Jack Reacher, Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne, and David Baldacci’s Amos Decker will love First Shot.

“When girls go missing here, no one says a word”...

Twenty-four year old Lila has disappeared without trace. It’s the kind of case that ex-military loner Grant Fletcher would normally be happy to take on - he will always seek justice if someone has the money to pay him. But this one he’s doing for free. This one’s personal.

Because Fletcher owes his life to Lila’s father. And Fletcher knows that returning Lila safe and sound is the only thing that matters to his wheelchair-bound friend.

She last called her father from a small town called Daversville, in rural Georgia. A place - Fletcher discovers as he checks into the only motel - where folks are proud to keep themselves to themselves, and almost all the business comes from the giant sawmill that looms large over the town.

Before he’s even started looking for Lila, Fletcher finds trouble. But he also discovers that his friend’s daughter wasn’t the first girl to go missing there. Not the first by far.

Then the last person to have seen Lila before she disappeared is murdered. With Fletcher on the scene when her body is found, he becomes the local deputy’s only suspect, leaving him no choice but to go on the run. Because he knows someone’s abducting girls in this town. And he also knows he’s the only one who can find them...

©2020 John Ryder (P)2020 Bookouture

Liked the story

I liked the book overall, but my only complaint is that at certain times the author over did some of the details. They dragged on and on as if he was trying to stretch out the story but didn’t need that.

A determined, understated hero

I enjoyed this story of a man with grit and determination. The scary part was that this kind of thing happens, not just in some third world country but in our own. I'm looking forward to more adventures of Grant Fletcher, Ex Royal Marine and resourceful private citizen, now living in the US.

Fun & fast-paced

First Shot had me hooked within the first hour. With a straight-forward plot, the action and main character (Grant Fletcher) take center stage. Grant is an easy character to root for. He’s raising his daughter as a widower, his wife having died some years back. With his military background, Grant is no stranger to tough situations. So when Lila goes missing, Grant is the perfect guy to send on the hunt and the hunt quickly turns into something bigger. Lots of young ladies have gone missing in Daversville and it looks like multiple residents of the town are in on it.

Then in steps FBI Agent Zoey Quadrado. She’s worked hard to get where she is in her career and this assignment to the middle of nowhere Georgia looks like an empty case at first blush. Yet as Zoey digs into it more, she finds that something just ain’t right with the town. I really liked how she treated Grant with (deserved) suspicion at first. Grant, however, won’t stop handing her clues and suspects. Or, at least, he tries to. But someone frees some ne’erdoewells he had restrained. This only reinforces why Zoey wants him to leave town and let her do the investigating and law enforcing.

A mysterious Trench gets mentioned, a witness turns up dead, and the guys Grant ‘questions’ aren’t saying anything even when injured and threatened with worse. All of this makes Grant go on high alert as he doesn’t know who in town he can trust with anything, including where he sleeps at night. Eventually, Quadrado and Grant team up and the action ramps up.

For me, here was the one weak spot in the story. Quadrado gets caught off her game more than once and I found that way too convenient for the plot. She had to work super hard to get where she in her career, she’s the top of her class, etc. Why would she make so many trainee mistakes when she has years of active service under her belt? Well, it meant that Grant had to rescue her. Ugh! That moment in the story was just too cliched.

Anyhoo, later on Quadrado recovers her wits and makes a difference in how the story ends. I’m glad she had this return to her character as playing the damsel in distress wasn’t a good look on her. Overall, it was a fun, fast-paced action story. 4/5 stars.

The Narration: Nick Landrum was pretty good for this story. He had the perfect voice for Grant Fletcher. He also had decent feminine voices for the female characters. I did wonder why he didn’t give more of the Georgia-born characters a Georgia accent. Sometimes his male character voices blended together when they were all talking together in a conversation. The pacing was good & there were technical issues with the recording. 4/5 stars.

I received a free copy of this book. My opinions are 100% my own.

Hard to get through, author must be a pacifist

Brutal to finish. Author clearly has no understanding of U.S. laws, no research performed.

seriously?

this book is ridiculous. there are numerous mistakes in the context (does- female deer do not have antlers) FBI stands for Federal Bureau of Investigation not Federal Bureau of Intelligence. what is a "trials" bike? did you mean "trail" bike? there is no way the FBI would send a female special agent by herself to investigate the disappearance of 15 women. no way Fletcher would have been charged with anything. the list goes on and on. and on top of that the narration was dry and monotone. I hope you make a lot of money from this book but to me it is filled with tons of mistakes.

neither thrilling nor gripping

The hype on the dust jacket (see words in title above), followed by the breathless 5-star reviews and invocations of names like Reacher for comparison simply prove that Audible/Amazon reviews are to be treated with more than a small dose of salt and skepticism. This book is dumb, silly, ridiculous, as in written by someone whose knowledge of the world and how it works seems to be derived from watching 1950s b-movies, while missing all the fun. The prose is unbearably labored, the dialogue stilted, the scenarios absurd, and the plot movement so leisurely that paint drying and grass growing are inadequate cliches to describe it. The narrator seems not to recognize any of these inadequacies, and maunders on in rigid lockstep with the doltish presentation. While this bok isn't evil, I can think fo few other activities that would not be a better expenditure of time (this is the kidn fo prose you'd have to put up with if you read the screed itself).