29 March 2015

Short Ride to Hell (The Brantley Colton Mysteries #1) by Rodd Clark

 For Brantley Colton, his crusade was over. There was nothing in the abyss left for him. Whatever he had once believed in had become a lie. There was no light at the end of the tunnel, just a long highway ahead, a dark road without signposts to direct him. Where would he go from here? The finality in his soul belied some joy in the closing moments. It was over, he could die now…but he couldn’t die happy. It had only been a few hours since he had put the Winter Glade Motel in his rear-view, but it seemed longer. Colton drove the desolate highway but felt tired and needed sleep. The air conditioning was on high to fend off the humid Florida evening. The air against his face was the only thing preventing him from drifting into dangerous sleep; even so he contemplated the series of events that had him traveling down 1-75 in the middle of the night…with the blood stains of the murdered man still present on his shirt. He had used an alias to register at the motel, paid in cash but feared something had been left behind which could tie him to the murder. He needed time to finish the job at hand and his sloppy second-guessing had placed him in peril. Colton had never been one for prayer, but felt like it was a good time to drop to his knees, to confess his crime and ask for forgiveness. Not that it would have done any good for him.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23303684-short-ride-to-hell?ac=1
Disclaimer – This book contains scenes of raw brutalities that are inflicted on the women who are kidnapped, raped and then killed. We also have a lot of consensual sex between MM and MF and well as non-consensual.  

We have three voices telling three version of the same story. A guy on a personal mission Colton, an FBI pro-filer Reston and then the serial killer they both are after. Colton has lost someone to this killer and has been tracking him from State to State as well as trying to stay one step ahead of Reston.  But as the trail heats up the killer abducts another victim. Can they find her before it’s too late?

In my opinion you have three stories being told by three different voices or three MC telling ‘talking’ during the same book is difficult for the best authors to pull off. And this author just didn’t do it. This story left me confused and frustrated before I got passed the third chapter. Which led to skim reading, or turning in my first DNF.  I never understood how a ‘normal’ guy could keep posing as this or that to get the families to talk and the FBI not catch on? I also got no empathy connection with Colton even though this is ‘his crusade’ He just comes off has another two-bit dime store P.I. I did enjoy the getting the inner working of the serial killer, obviously not the rape, killing part, but how we got there.

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