Sam Stevens is consumed by his failing marriage and, more than that, by the psychological harm his wife is doing to their ten-year-old son. As Sam covers a once-in-a-lifetime story-one that has turned Webster County into bedlam but is at last providing Sam with an opportunity for media star-don-he suddenly sees an even better chance to solce his personal problems forever.

But there's another player thrust into the national spotlight along with Sam: It's Sheriff Billy Wyatt, who's in way over his head. The FBI is breathing down his neck, and the national press highlights his every bungle. He's confronting a madman-and his own limits. Can he out-maneuver either?

Using elements that thriller readers have come to expect, Jonathan Stone has woven a story they assuredly will not expect. Whirlwind action and hurricane prose that echo the best of James Patterson and Harlan Coben, Stone is in top form, delivering a tale about the unchecked power of media and the unreasonable passions of fatherhood- with a payoff that will stun and star- toe, yet perfect sense.

Parting Shot is a shot of adrenaline. It's a bullet that rotates wildly till it finds its target-deep in the reader's imagination. It's the latest work from a writer whose fiction Ian Rankin has hailed as “prime entertainment” and T. Jefferson Parker has called “clever, bold, and a little nasty”

 

Jonathan Stone writes his fiction primarily on the commuter train between his advertising job in Manhattan and home in Connecticut, where he lives with his wife, his two children, and their Boston terrier. He is a graduate of Yale. This is his fourth novel.