Thirty-something venture capitalist Rylan “Ry” Birk; his younger sister, Katie, a U.S. Department of Labor investigator; chemical company director Bobby Doogan; and homicide detective Dan Wilson have been friends since childhood, but they’ve become somewhat estranged from the final member of their group, Connor Clayton. He’s been in an emotional tailspin in the years following an incident involving an unusual gun called a Borchardt C-93. The weapon belonged to JD, a drifter the 17-year-old friends met near some railroad tracks while getting drunk and high. An impaired Katie, while playing around with the gun, fired a wild shot into the air that, they found out later, may have killed an elderly man. (Later, Connor testified that JD, who killed a convenience store clerk the same night, was responsible for the errant shot.) Many years later, the group has largely made peace with their complicity in the cover-up—but then Connor goes missing, and it appears that JD might be back in their lives. Soon they find themselves uncovering a different, more wide-ranging conspiracy at Ry’s firm. Ry is preparing to close a multimillion-dollar deal with the company Bobby works for, and the siblings who own it—Thaddeus and Sofia—appear to be arranging a deadly attack as an act of vengeance. How the pair got to this point is revealed in a series of flashbacks, set over multiple decades. Hand’s briskly paced thriller tells a gripping story of how careless actions can ruin lives. The narrative intriguingly delves into the working-class background of the friend group and the white-collar crimes that drove the vengeful siblings to extremes—they recruit people who’ve experienced tragedies similar to theirs. Readers may wish that the work had explored class issues in more depth, and the novel could have benefited from a more straightforward presentation; readers receive enough information to put everything together long before the characters do. Still, the book will satisfy many thriller fans.
