John Rector (1)

Yes, more crime! It's my favourite genre. John Rector is a crime author I'd not read before and Out of the Black is his latest novel.

Former Marine Matt Caine is struggling with the death of his wife and his daughter Anna's serious injuries from the same accident that killed her mother. With the hospital bills for Anna piling up and no steady job, Matt does what he knows he shouldn't - he goes to the local loan shark for help. With his in-laws threatening to seek custody of Anna and the loan show more shark demanding his money, Matt makes another fateful decision. He agrees to be the wheel man for a job his childhood friend Jay has cooked up - kidnapping a wealthy man's wife.

As Jays says ..."This is easy money. The plan is rock solid. We can't lose."

Uh huh. You can see it coming can't you? Yep, the job doesn't go quite as planned...

Rector does an excellent job with the 'regular guy put in a bad situation' scenario. The focus is on the action, twists and turns that Rector has woven into his plot. And there were quite a few and some that I hadn't seen coming. Although Matt has his soft spots and treasured memories of his wife, character development comes a distant second to the rapid fire plot. But that's okay, as the book would bog down with too much sentimentality. Instead, Out of the Black reads like a Bruce Willis action flick. Tough guy with a soft centre, ready and willing to do anything to defend his own.

Rector writes in a pared down style - there are no unnecessary scenes or dialogue and the novel moves forward at a rapid pace. This was a good, quick page turner perfect for a lazy summer evening. show less

This book was a painful read. Not from a literary standpoint - Rector's writing is strong and compelling. And the book is short, so it's also a quick read. But it was difficult for me to keep reading on an emotional level - Dexter is a very troubled man, and it's hard to be inside of his head, watching his rationalizations for things that he says and does. But it's also kind of like looking at an accident on the side of the road - terrifying to look at, but impossible to look away from.

The show more book was relatively unique (the only other comparable book I can think of that I've read is Joyce Carol Oates's "Zombie") and definitely compelling. It did leave a few questions unanswered for me, and I wish a few areas had been fleshed out more (as painful as that would have been!) If you give it a shot, just be sure you're ready for something fairly dark and intense.

x-posted to Amazon show less

I bought this book because it was inexpensive and I had read a short review on a blog recommending the book. I was hoping for a couple of hours of recreational reading and a feeling that I hadn't wasted a couple of bucks. Well, far from it, this was the best couple of bucks I've spent on an unknown author (at least to me) in a very long time.

A man finds a girls body in his corn field. His personal life is in shambles and he should be taking medication but he's not. The girl (the dead one) show more wants his help. The story then becomes a challenge of determining what's real and what's not.

It is a page turner in the classical sense, it's disturbing, but you can't put it down. With every page you, like the protagonist being drawn deeper and deeper into something you probably should avoid. Only, you know you are on a path and you know you are both now doomed to follow this path to it's completion ....cause you can't put it down.

It's good ....really good. show less

Dexter, wakes up in his bed one morning, fully dressed, to find his friend, the local sheriff, standing over him and any memory of what happened last night gone. The sheriff is there because Dexter's wife called to tell him how angry and out of control Dexter was the night before, one reason she had left to move in with her mom for the time being. The sheriff also tells him that his tractor is gone from it's usual parking place and appears to have been driven into one of the fields, and is show more now stuck in a ditch.

Dexter has no memory of that either. Maybe because he has stopped taking his medication, medication that he has been taking since his stint years ago in the mental institution, and has started heavily drinking instead. Not good decisions, but two of only many, many bad decisions Dexter makes in this book.

When he goes out into the field to try and move the tractor, he catches a glimpse of something in the grove of trees that borders his farm. Thinking it is trash from the kids that sometimes hang out there at night, he is shocked to find a body, the dead body, of a young high school girl. At first, he starts to call the police, but then he knows that he will be their first suspect. And in fact, he is not at all sure that he did not kill her, since he can't remember the previous night.

So...he decides to investigate what happened himself. Not really smart.
But don't worry. He will not have to do it himself.
The bad new is that his companion is the dead girl herself, increasing horrible visions of the dead girl, urging him on to more ever more irrational and horrible things.
Dexter suffers from some unnamed metal disorder, which sounds a lot like schizophrenia, and is not helped by the fact that he has stopped taking the medication that have kept the voices at bay for years, or by the fact that he is drinking continually for most of the book. A very bad combination.
He is a man spiraling out of control. As we find out, something terrible has happen in Dexter's life in the previous year that has set off this decline and now his wife has left him and he is losing his tentative grasp on reality.Could he have killed someone in a drunken, mentally impaired blackout?
Well, he has before…

To have any sympathy for the narrator, you have to accept that there is, to him, some sort of logic in his endless series of bad, drunken, mad decisions. And I am not sure why, but I did. Maybe the concern of his friend, the sheriff and his wife is enough to convince us that he was once a different man and could be again. I did indeed find something likable and sympathetic about him. Yes, he is doing some very irrational things, all seeming just making the situation worse. But the reader still has some hope that maybe it will all work out, although it seems increasing unlikely. This book is a quick read and one that I found a real page turner. It is well written in a very direct style that suits the slightly bizarre story perfectly. Dark and creepy and disturbing and, luckily, short enough to be read in one long, scary sitting...all alone..in the dark...in the cold wee hours of the night. show less