Vengeance Road

By Rick Mofina

The body of Bernice Hogan, a troubled young former nursing student with a tragic past, is found in a shallow grave near a forest creek.

Jolene Peller, a single mom struggling to build a new life with her little boy, vanishes the night she tries to find Bernice.

Hero cop Karl Styebeck is beloved by his community, but privately police are uneasy with the answers he gives to protect the life--and the lie--he's lived.

The case haunts Jack Gannon, a gritty, blue-collar reporter whose own sister ran away from their family years ago. Gannon risks more than his job to pursue the story behind Styebeck's dark secret, his link to the women, and the mysterious big rig roaming America's loneliest highways on its descent into eternal darkness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
• Release date: Nov 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781460308233

Rick Mofina

Rick Mofina is a USA TODAY bestselling author of more than thirty crime fiction thrillers that have been published in nearly thirty countries. A former journalist, he has interviewed murderers on death row, flown over Los Angeles with the LAPD and patrolled with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police near the Arctic. He has also reported from the Caribbean, Africa, Kuwait and Qatar. He is a two-time winner of the Crime Writers of Canada Award of Excellence, a Barry Award winner, and a multiple finalist for the International Thriller Writers Thriller Award and the Shamus Award, presented by the Private Eye Writers of America. Library Journal calls him ""one of the best thriller writers in the business.""

Reviews for Vengeance Road

[dorie.craig · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Vengeance Road was a fairly good mystery novel. The main character, an underappreciated but brilliant newspaper reporter, was likeable but not really distinctive. The descriptions of the killings themselves was a bit annoying, with the aspects of how the victims were murdered more inferred than described. Although I don’t enjoy reading gruesome details, neither do I like being kept in the dark. Our hero also has an older sister that is mentioned, and I hope this plot line is resolved in future books, because there was not even a hint of resolution in this book. (And if not a set up for a future storyline, why include it at all?)

[agpadgett · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Vengeance Road is a thick book :)387 pages worth, and I only mention that because I'm not always in the mood for that kind of time investment. But Vengeance Road really is a page-turner. It hooks you and moves swiftly, without a lot of maundering about. Not a word, not a phrase is wasted. The characters seem real to you, like your neighbors and whether you like or dislike them, you can't help wanting to know what is going to happen with them.The main character is Jack Gannon, a Buffalo NY reporter, just hoping he can keep his job, or even better, get the scoop on a really big story and move to NY City. When a young woman, Bernice Hogan is murdered, he falls all over the story, thinking this will be his big chance.Then the story takes a turn. Gannon discovers that the main suspect is a policeman, Karl Styebeck.I won't reveal more of the plot, but it's a fascinating story. I appreciated Mofina's style of writing, which could often be terse (perhaps masculine is the word I'm looking for) but fit the suspense very well. I know others have complained about places where Gannon took too many chances (strained their suspension of disbelief) but I had no such difficulties. People in real life do a lot of crazy things and following a suspect for a story is something that I can totally see happening. Particularly for Gannon who so desperately wants to discover the truth. None of us ever think anything bad will happen to us. We all believe "we can handle it." So I had no problems at all believing Gannon would do precisely what he did.And that's why the characters worked for me. They acted in ways I could understand and that were right for that character (even if I, in a million years, would never follow a murder suspect alone. LOL).It's a great read and will keep you engrossed until the end.

[smik_3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is actually #1 in Rick Mofina's Jack Gannon series. I have already reviewed #2 THE PANIC ZONE.Jack Gannon, a reporter on the Buffalo Sentinel feels he has reached a sort of impasse in his life, and is living in a rut that he must break free from. Wheeling out, with Springsteen in his head, Gannon questioned where he was going with his life. He was thirty-four, single and had spent the last ten years at the Buffalo Sentinel. He looked out at the city, his city. And there was no escaping it. Ever since he was a kid, all he wanted to be was a reporter, a reporter in New York City. And it almost happened a while back after he broke a huge story behind a jetliner’s crash into Lake Erie. It earned him a Pulitzer nomination and job offers in Manhattan. But he didn’t win the prize and the offers evaporated.There's something about Rick Mofina's style that draws the reader in. It is deceptively simple, and gives Mofina the ability to build tension. By the last 20% of the book (in Kindle terms) you are positively racing to get to the end.I found my stance on the "guilty or not?" status of the decorated detective who is the focus of Gannon's investigation constantly shifting, as Gannon revealed more. As in THE PANIC ZONE there is the feeling of a race against time, that is, if Gannon doesn't get a move on, more lives will be lost. When Gannon refuses to reveal his sources for his initial disclosure for the Buffalo Sentinel he loses his job at the paper, and continues as an independent whom everybody treats as a pariah. But he doggedly continues his investigation, just ahead of the pack, and in the long run, putting his own life on the line.At the very end the author comments in crafting this story, I have taken great fictional liberties with geography, police jurisdiction, procedure and other aspects. Earlier he talks about how parts of the story are loosely based on an old story that occurred nearly half a century before.VENGEANCE ROAD is certainly worth a read, and I'm looking forward to reading #3, In Desperation sometime.

[elvisettey · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Vengeance Road is a faced-paced thriller, with short, explosive chapters that are each a little slice of action.The plot centers on Jack Gannon, journalist-cum-gumshoe, fired from his newspaper position for writing a front-page piece fingering a dirty cop. On his own and freelancing, he begins probing the murder of one young prostitute and the disappearance of her friend, a young woman who was beginning to get her life back on track. The pursuit of this story takes him cross-country (providing much material for those short, explosive chapters I mentioned earlier) and brings him into contact with the many characters in the novel who make only brief, tangential appearances. Running alongside Jack's storyline is the cop's storyline, told partially through flashbacks, in which we discover a sordid past that leads to his current situation and present-day motivations for undertaking the actions he is now undertaking. Yet another storyline is that of the missing girl, whose kidnapping we witness as her story plays out.The action in this novel is page-turning, blindingly so. I read it in less than a day. There's a lot of "white space," thanks to the short chapters. Still, the novel doesn't have any pretentions to being a psychological thriller, so there's not really any faulting it for that; it is what it is, and what it is is a novel that's first and foremost about turning pages to see what happens next. It's not a get-inside-the-character's-head sort of book. I do wish there had been at least a little of that, particularly with regard to our main character, Gannon-- as it stands, he's mostly just a gumshoe and nothing else. Nothing makes him tick beyond getting that story, grabbing that headline.Something else you won't find in this novel-- and this isn't a complaint; it's just an observation-- is high-tech CSI and forensics. It's just not that kind of book. This novel is driven, to say it yet again, by action, by digging into cold-hard facts about people and their pasts and following a storyline about them, not about where a particular fiber was manufactured and what this tells you about the perp. It's something that sets this book apart from a lot of other thrillers that are out there right now, so if the high-tech world isn't your scene, then this may be your cup of tea.If it had been possible to give this book three and a half stars, then I would have. It doesn't really have any pretensions to being anything other than a page-turner, so you can't fault it for shortcomings like lack of character development. Still, you miss things like that and wish there could have been a bit more of them. Particularly since Mofina apparently intends to make a series out of the Gannon novels, Gannon needs more character development. And things get wrapped up pretty hastily at the end, I have to say. And it's one of those miracle-saves, too.So. Long on action, long on storytelling, short on in-depth probing. Worth a quick Sunday afternoon's read.