Broken

by John Rector

Overview

Trust becomes a fatal mistake in this shocking thriller by the bestselling author of The Ridge.

Welcome to Beaumont Cove, a slowly decaying tourist town at the edge of the world, and the place where Maggie James’s worst fears for her estranged twin sister, Lilly, have come true.

Lilly is dead, and Maggie has arrived to identify her body.

Lilly’s husband, Mike, is in custody for her murder. With his long history of abuse, no one in town is surprised at the inevitable end to their stormy marriage, least of all Maggie. All she wants is to clean up her sister’s affairs, see Mike punished, and get out of Beaumont Cove.

With the help of the local sheriff, a retired private investigator, and a strange but friendly carnival psychic, Maggie begins to uncover the truth about what really happened to her sister. But the truth comes at a price, and soon Maggie finds herself walking a dark path toward the same deadly trap that killed Lilly.

The more Maggie discovers about her sister’s final days, the more she realizes that nothing is as it appears in this strange boardwalk town.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781542091503
Publisher:	Amazon Publishing
Publication date:	09/15/2020
Pages:	284
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

John Rector is the bestselling author of The Grove, The Cold Kiss, Already Gone, Out of the Black, Ruthless, and The Ridge. Rector’s short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and has won several awards, including the International Thriller Award for the novella Lost Things. For more information, visit www.johnrector.blogspot.com.

Editorial Reviews

07/06/2020

Maggie James, the protagonist of this unpleasant thriller from Rector (The Ridge), comes to Beaumont Cove, an isolated tourist destination that strikes her at first view as “a quaint Christmas village left to rot,” to identify the body of her estranged 23-year-old sister, Lily, who was strangled and badly beaten. Maggie and Lily, who grew up with their widowed police office father in Colorado, hadn’t spoken since Lily married her abusive, drunken boyfriend, Mike, a year earlier and moved with him to Beaumont Cove. Maggie has no doubt Mike, who has been arrested for Lily’s murder, killed her sister, and flashbacks show Mike beating Lily senseless. But other flashbacks, to the run-down beach motel where Lily and Mike were living in a long-stay apartment, reveal that someone else had motive. Maggie winds up staying in Beaumont Cove at great peril to her life. There’s no mystery as to how this familiar story unfolds or how it ends. Readers with a high tolerance for graphic violence will best appreciate this one. Agent: Scott Miller, Trident Media Group. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

2020-07-01
Identical twins lead very different lives.

When Lilly first stumbles into Beaumont Cove, it seems like heaven on Earth. Populated by “old bikers and hippies,” the quiet seaside village strikes romantic Lilly as just the place for her and her abusive husband, Mike, to mend their fragile relationship. The Orion Motor Lodge is all but deserted in the off-season, with only handyman Thomas Bennett as a fellow tenant. Lilly has time to wander the tranquil boardwalk and watch the waves crash against the foot of the Starlight Pier. But when her sister, Magnolia James, makes her way there more than a year later to claim Lilly’s battered body, she finds nothing more than a dilapidated resort town waiting for a tourist rush that’s never going to happen. Maggie initially resists Sheriff Parks’ efforts to book her into the slightly upscale Cliff House. She doesn’t plan to stay longer than the one day it will take for her to identify Lilly and confront Mike, who is in custody for her murder. Then it’s back home to Manitou Springs and her busy, orderly life as a private eye. Once Maggie sees Lilly’s body and meets with Mike, though, her plans change. There’s more than meets the eye in her sister’s death, like the missing key Lilly wore around her neck day in and day out. The combination of flashback and contemporaneous narration, alternating between first-person and third-person viewpoints, precludes any unforeseen plot twists. The result is a tale that’s creepy without being shocking, with a bit of last-minute violence that erases any of the goodwill Rector might have built earlier.

Not a destination that rewards the effort.

Kirkus Reviews