Some Awful Cunning by Joe Ricker

Release date: April 20, 2020

Subgenre: Crime Thriller, Noir

About Some Awful Cunning:

 

Ryan Carpenter is an underground relocation specialist who helps people escape the danger and traumas of their life and start over. After agreeing to help the young wife of a Texas oil baron relocate her stepson to escape criminal prosecution, Ryan learns more than he wants to about the oil baron, his wife, and the stepson.

Haunted by his own forced relocation, Ryan betrays his client and is forced to scramble for his life, which only puts him face to face with the childhood past he’s been trying to escape his entire life. His flight brings him from Albuquerque, New Mexico; back to New Orleans, Louisiana; where Ryan learned his underground trade as a relocation specialist or “travel agent.” There, Ryan seeks the help of his former mentor to escape the endless resources of the people who will stop at nothing to find Ryan and have him killed.

But first, Ryan’s mentor needs a favor, and that favor forces Ryan back to Ironwood, Maine, a small timber town where Ryan grew up, and where the one person who might figure out who Ryan really is, is an ambitious deputy will stop at nothing to become sheriff. A town where everyone remembers the tragedy that took Ryan and his family’s life.

Or so they thought…

 

Excerpt:

 

Ryan noted every miniscule adaptation in her eyes while she thought—a cautious awareness of any movement. He sat motionless, watching her acceptance of where she was, a recycled anticipation of the pain that had already drummed the chorus of a song she was trying to forget. Fear. Enough for him to know that she’d do everything he’d told her.

Beyond her fear, a coiling panic flexed her pupils in the pulsing of the light from the lamp in the corner behind her. The silence in the room began to drone a new noise in her head—blaring static.

Her son squatted between her thighs where she sat on the polyester comforter at the edge of the bed. He’d draped his arms over her knees, the frail seams along the calves of her jeans convenient crannies for his roving fingers. Sputtering came from his bottom lip, and Ryan looked down at the boy’s purple-bruise raccoon mask—the fragments of white tape still on his skin that had bandaged the split in his nose.

The woman lifted a shoulder slightly, wincing at the struggle to turn just a few degrees to check the clock again—one minute and forty-six seconds since her last check. Her back was rigid, and the panic in her eyes had drifted, replaced by something else that she didn’t have the capacity to acknowledge just yet, but it was him, Ryan sitting across from her on the wooden chair he’d pulled from the desk.

Ryan reached down to the cuffs of his dark gray suit, perfectly settled on the contour of his body. The fabric was still flat and neat despite the long hours he’d driven, silent, with the boy in the front seat next to him sleeping most of the way. Melissa hadn’t slept, hadn’t made an attempt to notice the landscape. She’d just sat in the middle of the back seat watching the road ahead of her until they’d arrived there, in the hotel room. Now, she stared at Ryan’s hand. At the edge of his left palm, where his pinky should have been, was a small, mangled bump of flesh. She hadn’t noticed until then. He pulled his cuffs down to his wrists, saw her and the child staring at his scar. Ryan stopped his movement, and the boy looked up, digging his middle fingers into the holes he’d made in his mother’s jeans.

“What happens now?” she asked.

“Now, you live your life, and I go to Texas to make sure Victoria Williams thinks you’re dead.”

 

Amazon | Down and Out Books

 

About Joe Ricker:

Ricker began his writing career as an undergraduate at the University of Mississippi, where he worked nights as a bartender at City Grocery. In both the bar and on campus, he was mentored by local authors and instructors Barry Hannah, Larry Brown, and Tom Franklin. Esquire magazine referred to him as: “A man of letters who’s gentle in the way that only the toughest of hard-asses can be.” He earned an MFA from Goddard College, and moved on to teach in Ithaca, New York, for nearly a decade. After leaving Ithaca, Ricker spent two years living out of his car and traveling through the western United States with his dog Kamani. He settled in Reno, Nevada, where he currently resides. Ricker has worked as an innkeeper, cab driver, carpenter, ranch-hand, lumberjack, and strip-club bouncer.

 

Website | Twitter | Instagram