Don't Look Twice (Ty Hauck Series #2)

Don't Look Twice (Ty Hauck Series #2)

by Andrew Gross
Don't Look Twice (Ty Hauck Series #2)

Don't Look Twice (Ty Hauck Series #2)

by Andrew Gross

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Overview

“A master of no-nonsense, good, old-fashioned suspense….Littered with surprises from start to finish, Don’t Look Twice offers the perfect blend of menace and normality.”
—Steve Berry, New York Times bestselling author of The Venetian Betrayal

 

Don’t Look Twice, the third solo effort—and third consecutive New York Times bestseller—from Andrew Gross, author of The Blue Zone and The Dark Tide, brings back Detective Ty Hauck and ensnares him in a lethal maze of cover-up and corruption. Gross, who co-wrote several bestsellers with suspense superstar James Patterson, soars to new heights with his intrepid action hero Hauck—whom the Connecticut Post calls, “a Jack Reacher with heart.”


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780061972782
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 10/06/2009
Series: Ty Hauck Series , #2
Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
Format: eBook
Pages: 464
Sales rank: 111,490
File size: 906 KB

About the Author

About The Author

Andrew Gross is the author of the New York Times and international bestsellers Everything to Lose, No Way Back, 15 Seconds, Eyes Wide Open, Reckless, Don't Look Back, The Dark Tide, and The Blue Zone. He is also coauthor of five number one bestsellers with James Patterson, including Judge & Jury and Lifeguard. His books have been translated into more than twenty-five languages.

Read an Excerpt


Don't Look Twice

A Novel



By Andrew Gross
HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2009

Andrew Gross
All right reserved.



ISBN: 9780061143441


Chapter One

"Mango Meltdown or Berry Blast?"

Ty Hauck scanned the shelves of the Exxon station's refrigerated cooler.

"Whatever . . ." his thirteen-year-old daughter, Jessie, responded with a shrug, her eyes alighting on something more appealing. "What about this?"

Powie Zowie.

Hauck reached inside and read the brightly colored label. Megajolt of caffeine. Highest bang for the buck.

"Your mother lets you drink this stuff?" he asked skeptically.

Jessie looked back at him. "Mom's not exactly here, is she?"

"No." Hauck nodded, meeting her gaze. "I guess she's not."

In just the past year, forbidding new curves had sprung up on his daughter's once-childlike body. Bra straps peeking out from under her tank top. Jeans clinging to the hips in an "unnatural" way. Gangly suddenly morphing into something a bit more in the range of troubling. Not to mention the newly mastered repertoire of eye rolls, shrugs, and exaggerated sighs. Hauck wondered if the request for an ankle tattoo or a belly piercing could be far behind. "You don't get to win," a friend who had teenage daughters once warned him. "You only delay."

Jesus, he recalled, it was just a year ago that she liked to get shoulder rides from me.

"Toss it in the basket," he said, acquiescing. "One."

Jessie shrugged without even the slightest smile, failing to grasp the significance of his offering. "Okay."

At the end of the aisle, a man in a green down vest and tortoiseshell glasses reached into the cooler and met Hauck's gaze. His amused, empathetic smile seemed to say, Know exactly what you're going through, man!

Hauck grinned back.

A year had passed since the Grand Central bombing. A year since the events set in motion by the hit-and-run accident down on Putnam Avenue had thrust Hauck out of his long slumber and into the public eye. In that year, Hauck had been on the morning news shows and MSNBC and Greta Van Susteren, the case rocking not just the tall iron gates of the Loire-styled mansions out on North Avenue, but the financial circles in New York as well. It had turned Hauck into a bit of a reluctant celebrity—the object of friendly ribbing from his staff and the local merchants along the avenue. Even his old hockey buddies, who used to tip their mugs to him because of how he once tore up the football league at Greenwich High, now joked about whether he knew Paris or Nicole, or could get them past the bouncers into some fancy new club in the city on a Saturday night. Finally Hauck just had to step back, get his life in order.

And keep things on a steady keel with Karen, whose husband's death had been at the heart of the case.

And with whom he had fallen in love.

At first, it had been hard to bridge all the differences between them. She was rich. Hauck was the head of detectives on the local force. Their families, lifestyles, didn't exactly merge. Not to mention all the attention the case had generated. That in solving the mystery of her husband's death Hauck had unleashed something buried and now restless inside her. In the past year, her father, Mel, had taken ill with Parkinson's. Her mother wasn't handling it well. Karen had gone down to Atlanta to help take care of him, with her daughter away at Tufts and her son, Alex, now sixteen, recruited to play lacrosse at an upstate prep school.

It had been a year in which Hauck had finally learned to put much of the pain of his own past behind him. To learn to feel attached again. To fight for someone he wanted. He knew Karen loved him deeply for what he had done for her. Still, a lot of things stood in the way. Not just the money thing or their different families and backgrounds. Lately, Hauck had detected something in her. A restlessness. Maybe a sense of wanting to finally be free after being tied to a man her whole adult life, one who had so painfully deceived her. It was always a roll of the dice, they both knew, how things might work out between them. The jury was still out.

"C'mon," he said to Jess, "grab some M&M's; the boat's waiting."

The autumn chill was late in coming that October Saturday morning, and they were heading out for a final jaunt on his skiff, the Merrily, over to Captain's Island before taking it out of the water for the winter. Maybe kick the soccer ball around a bit—not a mean feat these days for Hauck (whose leg had still not fully healed from the .45 he had taken to the thigh). Grill a few dogs. Who knew how many more of these Saturdays he'd have with Jess. Just getting her up before ten was already becoming a hard sell. They'd just stopped off on the way to fill up the Explorer and pick up a few snacks.

Sunil, who ran the Exxon station next to the car wash on Putnam, was always a friend to the guys on the force. Hauck always made it his habit to fill up here.

As they reached the counter, a woman was at the register ahead of them. The man in the green down vest stepped up, his arms wrapped around two six-packs of soda.

"You guys go ahead." He waved them ahead and smiled good-naturedly.

"Thanks." Hauck nodded back and nudged Jessie.

"Thanks," she turned back and said.

While they waited, Hauck said, "You know, I really hope you'll come up for Thanksgiving this year. Karen'll be back."

She shrugged. "I don't know, Dad."

"You should. She likes you, Jess. You know that. It would make me feel good."

"It's not that . . ." She twisted her mouth. "It's just that it's different. They're, you know . . . rich. Samantha and Alex, I mean, they're nice, but . . ."



Continues...


Excerpted from Don't Look Twice by Andrew Gross Copyright © 2009 by Andrew Gross. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Interviews

Q: Where did the character of Ty Hauck come from? Is he based on anyone you know?

A: I wanted someone down to earth and a little rugged, a little out of place amid the wealth, power, and self-importance that surrounds Greenwich, Connecticut, where my books take place. I wanted someone who carries a tragic past on his shoulders, yet who learns to free himself from it and live again. Hauck is grounded in reality, yet he is very much a romantic. And in his heart Hauck's a knight-someone who is willing to take on the labors and needs of others at his own peril. He's a man who has a clear sense of the truth and in that sense he's a lot less cynical than I am.


Q: What kind of research do you do for your novels when it comes to plot and character?

A: I'm probably not the most assiduous researcher when it comes to character and plot, because I want my stories to be about everyday people put in dire situations-and how they rise and/or fail to meet those challenges-and I don't want to get overwhelmed by detail. So I try to do in a paragraph or two what most writers might do in pages. Enough to create the context and, hopefully, make readers trust they're in good hands. But I'm not an information provider-I want my stories to move much more quickly that that!


Q: You started out working with a master of the genre. What was it like teaming with James Patterson? What did you learn from him? What was it like leaving the safety of that successful partnership and branching out on your own?

A: Working with Patterson was great! He has an uncanny instinct for ways to propel a story. He is perhaps a better editor than a writer- always askingwhat the essential component in a scene is, when a writer is being too "writerly," what is inherently dramatic. In some books I read. I'm not sure that the author understands the key dramatic moments of his own book. Jim is always able to put his finger on that, and it's an essential talent to have. He also taught me the basics of pace, getting the reader to care about your hero quickly, the merits of detailed outlining, and how to keep infusing your story with surprises, which I think are all elements I've tried to bring to my books.
Do I miss him? In many ways I still do. It was a blessing for me to have one of the keenest minds in the business to bounce ideas off of or shoot pages down to and get an immediate reply. Sometimes I still want to call him! There is no question that my work with him set me up as a writer with an immediate connection of a million readers. Leaving the safety of that writing relationship was never a concern artistically-I knew I could do it on my own. But I was a little nervous because I'd sold The Blue Zone based upon an outline, and I wanted to make sure that the actual book would be as good! That one day, people wouldn't say, "Yeah, the book was okay, but you shoulda read that outline!!"


Q: Most authors have a process, whether it's working diligently for a certain number of hours in a particular place or writing whenever the mood (or the muse) calls. What's your process like?

A: One, I'm a morning writer. I try to work from eight to one p.m. or so, and then spend time setting the stage for what I'm going to do the next day. Since I outline my chapters well ahead, and the structure of my books is roughly a hundred chapters, three to four pages each, I try to write a chapter a day and don't quit until I do. I rarely skip ahead. Even in its clumsiest, most painfully inept form, I get a chapter out. The next morning I begin by going over it, and by the end of that second go-around, it's usually in presentable form. Maybe two or three more sessions, and I insert it into the draft.


Q: What's been the biggest surprise about your success?

A: The biggest surprise of my career? You mean other than waking up a few years back and seeing my name at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list? Probably how difficult it is to successfully market a book-and how few tools there truly are to get that accomplished. The truth is there are no short cuts. You build your base from the ground floor up. And nothing delivers more than consistency. Which is what I strive for.


Q: What are you doing when you're not writing?

A: When I'm not writing . . . I seem to spend an awful lot of time staring up at the ceiling. Trying to figure out what the hell I'm going to be writing tomorrow! When I'm not doing that I play tennis, read a lot about wines, field crisis calls from my kids, and do the cooking most nights.

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