Nothing Short of Dying A Clyde Barr Thriller
Reviewed By Janet Mawdesley September 8, 2016
Author Erik Storey
Distributor: Simon And Schuster
ISBN: 9781471146831
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Release Date: August 2016
Website: http://www.simonandschuster.com.au
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Clyde Barr is finally finding peace of a sort in his life after years of horror and torment. In a reflective mood he allows himself to drift back to a time when life was different, not altogether different, just different.
After three years in prison, unjustly so, he has contacted his three sisters with varying results, none of them good, but as he sits by the flickering lights of his campfire in his beloved mountains, his youngest sister contacts him with a frantic plea for help and then the line goes dead. Jen is the one he has always looked out for and she for him during the years of their tumultuous childhood and he would do anything at all to go to her help, even if it meant dying.
And so a rip roaring story commences that will see Barr and a young woman named Allie take on one of the largest drug cartels in order to save Jen once again from the trouble that somehow, she always seems to find or that seems to find her. Fast paced, fascinating and totally riveting the story gathers pace as Jen will only be allowed to stay alive until her purpose is fulfilled, which as far as Barr can work out is only days, has something to do with where she had been working and the manufacture of drugs on a large scale.
Allie is an unlooked for complication, as she is just one more person Barr feels responsible for but he soon comes to realise there is far more to her than he though and that she is there with the best of them when the going gets tough and it does.
There are times, when the body count is rising, Barr reflects on the fact that he thought he had left this lifestyle far behind, but realises that in the end you are what you choose to be as he goes about doing what needs to be done, making pacts with various ‘devils’ to try and work out just where Jen is being held and how big the cartel is that he has now sworn to eliminate at all costs.
Deception, honour, treachery, hatred and love all come together to paint a portrait of fast paced action as you are there with Barr, Allie and Jen as they struggle to survive everything life can dish up. In the final wash-up, Barr is once again heading back to his beloved mountains when he figures out the true and lasting gift Allie gave him, which is to accept who he was and to see what he can become.
As a debut novel by Erik Story this is a real ‘ripper of a yarn’ as they say and hopefully, the first of many more to come as Clyde Barr obviously has a few more ghosts, real and otherwise, to slay and adventures to become embroiled within.