Book details

After thirteen years as a homicide detective, his wife dead, and his best friend shot in a robbery, Sean O’Brien feels like he’s been through a war. He leaves the streets of Miami for a simpler life on the banks of the St. Johns River near the Ocala National Forest. What he discovers there, however, opens a dark door to something more frightening than anything he ever investigated in Miami.

 

O’Brien has bought an old, rundown home and begun repairs when he sees a man walking chest-deep in the nearby alligator-infested river. The man is holding a pole, searching for something. Soon afterward, O’Brien finds a young woman hidden near the river, and she’s clinging to life. She whispers something cryptic in his ear.

 

O’Brien made a promise to his dead wife, Sherri, that he was through with crime investigation. It was a promise he meant to keep. When he makes a second promise to the brutally beaten girl, it’s one he believes the local authorities will keep. Since the victim is a “nobody,” he finds he can’t count on them to pursue justice. Torn between his two promises, O’Brien is irrevocably plunged into the cold, lethal world of human trafficking and sexual slavery, where a brilliant killer believes he is working for the greater good, and will alter his evil plan to include O’Brien.

 

Tom Lowe’s debut is at once captivating and terrifying, harkening a bold new voice in crime fiction.

From Publishers Weekly

Lowe's debut offers little suspense or surprise, though well-crafted prose suggests he's capable of better. Ex-Miami homicide cop Sean O'Brien, who's retreated to a house on Florida's St. Johns River, carries the usual baggage for a reluctant hero. His wife died from cancer six months earlier, and his policeman father was shot dead in the line of duty when he was a child. O'Brien calls in the Volusia County police after discovering a severely beaten, dying young woman on the river bank. O'Brien soon finds himself attracted to one investigating officer, Det. Leslie Moore, and at odds with another, Det. Mitchell Slater, who he believes may be covering up for the killer. Predictably, the unidentified woman's slaying may be connected with an unsolved serial murder case O'Brien worked on in Miami. Suspects include some powerful locals possibly involved in sex trafficking. O'Brien could sustain a series if he's attached to less by-the-numbers story lines in the future. Author tour. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

Sean O’Brien’s lifestyle seems at first glance to be the envy of us all. Though barely on the shady side of 40, he has a riverfront cabin home on one of Florida’s (and America’s) signature wilderness waterways, the Saint John’s River. He is also proud possessor of a cabin cruiser birthed practically in the shadow of Ponce Inlet lighthouse. And if that isn’t enough, he has chick-magnet charisma, but he prefers as a companion a gator-bait dachshund by the name of Max. O’Brien is not a moneyed ne’er-do-well. He is instead a widower and a “retired” Miami homicide detective, and, according to Volusia County sheriff’s investigator, he’s a good prospect to take the fall for a string of sex murders, a situation that forces him back to crime solving. Though a bit light on the reality quotient here and there, A False Dawn makes good reading for anyone longing to stumble upon an unpublished John D. MacDonald Florida mystery. This isn’t quite that, but it will do nicely. --Steve Glassman

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