Thunder Road

By: Colin Holmes

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

In this gamble, more than a few poker chips are at stake.

When an Army Air Force major vanishes from his top-secret job at the Fort Worth airbase in the summer of 1947, down-on-his-luck former Ranger Jefferson Sharp is hired to find him, because the major owes a sizable gambling debt to a local mobster. The search takes Sharp from the hideaway poker rooms of Fort Worth's Thunder Road, to the barren ranch lands of New Mexico, to secret facilities under construction in the Nevada desert.

Lethal operatives and an opaque military bureaucracy stand in his way, but when he finds an otherworldly clue and learns President Truman is creating a new Central Intelligence Agency and splitting the Air Force from the Army, Sharp begins to connect dots. And those dots draw a straight line to a conspiracy aiming to cover up a secret that is out of this world - literally so.

©2022 Colin Holmes (P)2022 CamCat Books

Had me chuckling for the first half

The book had me chuckling every few minutes for the first half of the book. It captured and had great fun with the detective noir atmospherics of the late 1940’s and Texas politics/B-36 development of the period. It shifted to a period Sci-Fi genre at the end which was good ….but not as much fun for me personally. I read and enjoyed The Oxygen Farmer first, and then had to read this book. I’m hoping that the next book by this author will be coming soon.

Amazing

This was a fun story and amazingly researched. Great characters and tension. Took me back to that time period. I only wished the protagonist had done more than just finally get all the clues put together, or more merited his final position.

At last! A New John D. MacDonald.

Having finished the 21st -and last- Travis McGee novel, I stumbled upon THUNDER ROAD and an author whose plot, characters and pacing resemble the master of the genre, John D. MacDonald. Congratulations Colin Holmes. This is a ripping yarn, which includes some laugh-out-loud lines. Grover Gardner is the perfect narrator for this book.

An author myself, struggling with fiction, I am so often disappointed with stories that employ cheap tricks, superhuman feats and those 'Oh of COURSE he would do that' moments that crush the plausibility of the story, take you out of the moment, and ruin the experience. None of that here. This whole experience is 11/10.

There are only two glaring faults: I wanted the book to go for another 10 or 20 hours, and the next ten in the series are yet to be written.

Hurry up Mr.Holmes, your world is waiting. Thank you for Thunder Road, I loved it.

Love Grover Gardeners narration

I chose this book because Grover Gardner is the narrator. After listening to him narrate the Andy Carpenter series I became a big fan. I live in New Mexico so this story was familiar.