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Hello there - thanks for visiting me at Amazon. My second thriller, FATAL OPTION, was published in hardcover and ebook in February of 2017 by Post Hill Press and is distributed by Simon & Schuster. It earned a great review from Kirkus, and was featured in the April 15 edition of the magazine, and it's earned lots of praise from reviewers at Goodreads and here on Amazon, where it hit #1 in the Crime category in May of 2017.
I think the best way to describe it is by sharing what my publisher wrote in the letter that’s accompanying the Advance Reading Copies:
Dear Readers and Reviewers:
On the coldest night of the year, Stephen Porter is pulled from a restless sleep by a midnight phone call. His 17-year-old daughter Sara is stranded in a blizzard near the top of a mountain beyond their suburban home. She's terrified and unable to stop crying as she begs him to come to her rescue.
Unfortunately, Stephen went to bed after a night of binge drinking prompted by a recent death in the family just an hour before. With his blurred vision and unsteady balance he knows it’s dangerously irresponsible to get behind the wheel. But he heads out into the snowstorm to bring Sara home.
High school teacher Kieran O’Shea is also behind the wheel, searching for his autistic younger brother Aidan, who is wandering aimlessly through the storm on that same mountain. Kieran is also terrified—of the voices in his mind, of the possibility that Aidan will be taken from him, and the likelihood he will be arrested for murdering three women.
In a matter of minutes Stephen will encounter Kieran and drive headlong into a collision that will force him to question everything he knows about his family and protect his children from a violence that hits all too close to home.
I’ve come across a lot of thrillers during the nearly three decades I’ve spent at Simon & Schuster, Random House and now Post Hill Press. From the very first pages Chris Beakey’s Fatal Option captivated me like no other book in recent memory. It’s a striking portrayal of a good man who does a very bad thing for the best of all possible reasons.
My enthusiasm for this book is shared by a growing number of thriller writers at the top of their game, along with everyone here at Post Hill Press. We’re producing more Advance Reading Copies than we’ve offered for any other title, and are going to great lengths to support Chris’ efforts to connect with readers and reviewers.
Anthony Ziccardi
Publisher
Of course I’m thrilled with Anthony’s praise of this book. It’s not really a jumping up and down kind of thrilled though . . . more of a calm appreciation for the reward from decades of hard work. Owing more to the power of belief and motivation than talent, I started writing stories as soon as I was able to hold a pencil. Success came in snippets years later – with English compositions singled out by a certain high school teacher who held me after class and told me to keep at it; followed by a novella published in serial form in my college newspaper and a short story that won first prize in a literary competition.
The hard years came news – about 20 to be exact. They’re a bit of a blur now – thanks to 4 a.m. wake up calls that gave me three hours to write before heading off to my day job, and the emotionally challenging ups and downs and hairpin turns that eventually led me to an agent and my first book. DOUBLE ABDUCTION was published in 2007 by a small publisher who rescued it from an only slightly-larger publisher that declared bankruptcy the day after the Advance Reading Copies were printed. It earned good reviews and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.
I started FATAL OPTION a couple of years after that, and rewrote it three times before Anthony and his team gave me their enthusiastic thumbs up. I’d be very pleased to know what my fellow readers in the GoodReads community think of the opening chapters (which are posted on my page).
I also look forward to sharing reviews of other books. I write them on my blog atwww.blog.chrisbeakey.com, and also for the New York Journal of Books. Feel free to connect with me on Facebook and by email at chrisbeakey@verizon.net.
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