No Second Chances

by Don Bruns

Overview

When a fellow cop is shot dead, homicide detective Quentin Archer suspects that there’s far more to this case than meets the eye.

One of Quentin Archer’s fellow officers has been shot dead in broad daylight, in his own squad car. A random cop killing . . . or something more sinister? With no leads to go on, Archer turns to voodoo queen Solange Cordray for help. But is he prepared to take her advice?

As Archer uncovers some surprising facts about the dead man’s past, there is another murder. With the simmering racial tensions in the city threatening to escalate into outright violence, Archer begins to suspect there’s far more to Officer Leroy’s killing than he’d first supposed. Could it be part of a carefully-orchestrated plan of revenge . . .?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780727887566
Publisher:	Severn House Publishers
Publication date:	03/01/2018
Series:	A Quentin Archer Mystery , #3
Edition description:	First World Publication
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Don Bruns is an award-winning novelist, songwriter, musician and advertising executive who lives in South Florida. He is the author of the Lesser and Moore, and Mick Sever Caribbean mystery series, and two previous Quentin Archer mysteries.

Editorial Reviews

01/01/2018
At the start of Bruns’s richly nuanced third novel featuring New Orleans homicide detective Quentin Archer (after 2017’s Thrill Kill), Nick Martin, a 29-year-old truck driver, dies in 1992 when he drives off a road to avoid a head-on collision with another semi. The hijackers who arranged this trap steal Martin’s load of 800 cases of cigarettes. Flash forward 25 years to present-day New Orleans. The death of white police officer Johnny Leroy, shot at point-blank range in his squad car by a young black man, fuels racial tensions in the community. The reader knows it’s a revenge killing of some sort. With pressure from the mayor to solve the crime immediately and with no witnesses or clues to go by, Archer accepts the offer of love interest Solange Corday, a psychic and voodoo practitioner, to apply her esoteric skills to the investigation. They eventually un­cover a link between the hijacking and Leroy. Bruns clearly loves New Orleans and pithily inserts details of the city’s com­plex history and culture. Agent: Jill Marr, Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

2017-12-07
The stunning execution of a white New Orleans cop turns out to have roots in a 25-year-old crime.Officer Johnny Leroy was a decorated veteran of the NOPD with a stellar record and few known enemies—certainly no one who'd be aggrieved enough, or bold enough, to shoot him as he sat behind the wheel of his parked cruiser. Although Detective Quentin Archer and every officer the force can spare spend countless hours poring through Leroy's quarter-century of arrest records, their progress is slow. Nor do the initial efforts of voodoo priestess Solange Cordray, who's worked with Archer before (Thrill Kill, 2017, etc.), yield more than hints toward the solution. Bruns, however, makes no secret of the killer's identity or motive. He's Joseph Brion, and, as he announces to Leroy just before he pulls the trigger, he's acting on behalf of his father, André. When Old Joe Washington, an unarmed black man, is shot in an apparently unrelated incident as he flees the scene of a convenience store robbery, the Big Easy turns mighty uneasy, and raucous crowds carrying signs saying "Black Lives Matter" and "Police the Police" demand justice even as they turn up the heat on Archer's investigation. In a city that clears a measly 27 percent of its homicides, the odds are against Archer. But dogged questioning, led largely by the increasingly detailed visions of Solange, sets the NOPD on Brion's trail, and a dragnet closes slowly around the man who lives only to spark the large-scale riots that his thirst for vengeance demands. Even if there seems no room left for the unexpected, Bruns still has one last surprise up his sleeve.A workmanlike, unspectacular case that combines honest detection, an unlikely romance, and headline-driven paranoia and wraps it all up in under 200 pages.

Kirkus Reviews