Semi Finalist
Assessment:
Plot/Idea: It’s clear from the start that no one can be trusted and everyone’s a potential suspect in this breakneck thriller. When an assignment goes south, Detective Miles Jordan and his partner, Vincent Santoro, are tasked with figuring out who the mole is. From the first pages action is key, and Ceron never loses sight of the twists and turns that make this genre so gripping.
Prose: The author’s sharp prose etches the tension of action scenes onto the page, with knife-edge dialogue and natural clues that build up to the killer ending.
Originality: The nearly perfect pace of Ceron’s writing blows this thriller out of the water, and just when readers think they’ve figured out the puzzle, Ceron throws in twist after twist, culminating in one wild ride.
Character/Execution: Ceron’s characters are both classic and unique, and their backstories instinctively fall into place during the course of the novel. Miles offers readers an organic viewpoint of the plot’s trajectory through his first-person perspective, and readers will feel as if they are putting the pieces together right alongside him and his likable partner.
Date Submitted: May 03, 2023
A suspenseful crime story with deft plotting and a resourceful, well-developed protagonist.
ANew York City detective races against time to stop a terrorist attack in Venice, Italy, in Ceron’s thriller.
Although this assured thriller is the author’s first full-length novel, he introduced its protagonist Miles in a previous novella, Death of the Saltwater Blonde (2022). Miles Jordan—“Detective First Grade New York Police Department, FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force Officer, and Jamal’s Big & Tall Gold Star Customer”—is in Venice as part of a counterterrorism force partnering with the Italian military police. The mission: use captured sleeper agent Aarzam El-Hashem as bait to catch the elusive terrorist known as the Scorpion, assumed to be targeting the Israeli prime minister during the latter’s visit to the city in a few days. The task force’s plans go awry, and the arrogant, ambitious commander of the Venice Carabinieri, Col. Giuseppe Marino, blames Miles. However, the Scorpion sees Miles’ persistence and tendency to think outside the box as the real threats to him. Miles, who is Black, is about to be removed from the case by the American special agent in charge, a racist, “hardline good ol’ boy”; however, a clandestine meeting with a CIA operative opens new lines of inquiry and buys him more time. Ceron’s fast-paced, multilayered plot encompasses a meeting at the Roman Catholic Church archdiocese with an outspoken anti-Islam cardinal, a disturbing encounter with the leader of a shadowy organization of terrorist Catholic fanatics, and even a possible mole within the Carabinieri. The villains are a bit shallowly developed, but this is mitigated by the novel’s overall emotional resonance, particularly in the poignant tale of desperate father Nabeel Haddad, who unknowingly gets caught up in the lethal plot, and Miles’ burgeoning relationship with the haunted, Somalia-born Kamaria Uba of the Carabinieri.
A suspenseful crime story with deft plotting and a resourceful, well-developed protagonist.
