Today I’m taking part in the blog tour for Jeffery Deaver’s latest, The Goodbye Man. It’s the second book in his Colter Shaw series and has all the usual Deaver hallmarks!
I’ve got a little extract for you to whet your appetite. Enjoy!
Chapter 2.
June 11, 8 a.m., six hours earlier
Shaw was piloting his thirty-foot Winnebago camper through the winding streets of Gig Harbor, Washington State.
With about seven thousand inhabitants, the place was both charming and scuffed around the edges. It was, to be sure, a harbor, well protected, connected to Puget Sound via a narrow channel through which pleasure and fishing craft now glided. The Winnebago motored past working and long-abandoned factories devoted to manufacturing vessels and the countless parts and accessories with which ships were outfitted. To Colter Shaw, never a sailor, it seemed like you could spend every minute of every day maintaining, repairing, polishing and organizing a boat without ever going out to sea.
A sign announced the Blessing of the Fleet in the middle of the harbor, the dates indicating that it had taken place earlier in the month.
Pleasure craft now welcome!
Perhaps the industry was now less robust than in the past, and the organizers of the event wanted to beef up its image by letting lawyers and doctors and salesmen edge their cabin cruisers up to the circle of the commercial craft—if that geometry was in fact the configuration for fleet blessing.
Shaw, a professional reward seeker, was here on a job—the word he used to describe what he did. Cases were what law enforcement investigated and what prosecutors prosecuted. Although after years of pursuing any number of criminals Shaw might have made a fine detective, he wanted none of the regimen and regulation that went with full- time employment. He was free to take on, or reject, any job he wished to. He could choose to abandon the quest at any time.
Freedom meant a lot to Colter Shaw.
He was presently considering the hate crime that had brought him here. In the first page of the notebook he was devoting to the investigation, he’d written down the details that had been provided by one of his business managers:
Location: Gig Harbor, Pierce County, Washington State.
Reward offered for: Information leading to the arrest and conviction of two individuals:
—Adam Harper, 27, resident of Tacoma.
—Erick Young, 20, resident of Gig Harbor.
Incident: There have been a series of hate crimes in the county, including graffiti of swastikas, the number 88 (Nazi symbol) and the number 666 (sign for the devil) painted on synagogues and a half-dozen churches, primarily those with largely black congregations. On June 7, Brethren Baptist Church of Gig Harbor was defaced and a cross burned in the front yard. Original news story was that the church itself was set on fire but that was found to be inaccurate. A janitor and a lay preacher (William DuBois and Robinson Estes) ran outside to confront the two suspects. Harper opened fire with a handgun, wounding both men. The preacher has been released from the hospi tal. The janitor remains in the intensive care unit. The perpetrators fled in a red Toyota pickup, registered to Adam Harper.
Law enforcement agencies running case: Pierce County Public Safety Office, liaising with U.S. Justice Department, which will investigate to determine if the incident is a federal hate crime.
Offerors and amount of reward:
—Reward one: $50,000, offered by Pierce County, underwritten by the Western Washington Ecumenical Council (with much of that sum donated by MicroEnterprises NA founder Ed Jasper).
—Reward two: $900 offered by Erick Young’s parents and family.
To be aware of: Dalton Crowe is actively pursuing the reward.
This last bit of intelligence wasn’t good.
The Goodbye Man by Jeffery Deaver is published by Harper Collins on 14 May 2020. Many thanks to Harper Collins and Anne Cater for the advance copy of the book for review.
In pursuit of two young men accused of terrible hate crimes, Colter Shaw stumbles upon a clue to another mystery. In an effort to save the life of a young woman—and possibly others—he travels to the wilderness of Washington State to investigate a mysterious organization. Is it a community that consoles the bereaved? Or a dangerous cult under the sway of a captivating leader? As he peels back the layers of truth, Shaw finds that some people will stop at nothing to keep their secrets hidden. All the while, Shaw must unravel an equally deadly enigma: locating and deciphering a message hidden by his father years ago, just before his death—a message that will have life-and-death consequences.
espresso coco 
Thanks for supporting the blog tour Dave xx