Speed City SinC Member Releases New Novel: Stephen Terrell's Last Train to Stratton

Stephen Terrell, member of Speed City Sisters in Crime, has released a new novel, Last Train to Stratton.  The novel is available in print and eBook formats on Amazon.com.

Janis Thornton, author of Too Good a Girl, commented: "Stephen Terrell’s Last Train to Stratton sneaks up on you and yanks you in. The writing is as sensitive as it is tough, and the unforgettable characters are as familiar as they are fresh. Simply put, Last Train to Stratton is a gripping, heartfelt read that will stay with you long after you finish it."

Set in the years between the end of the Vietnam War and the Nation’s Bicentennial, the book follows Zach Carlson, a deeply cynical Chicago crime beat reporter. When Zach’s life in Chicago shatters, he moves to a small Indiana town to run a weekly newspaper, seeking to lose himself in the mundane dullness of small-town America.

Instead of tranquility, Zach finds a town trying to cope with its own fear, anxiety and anger. When Stratton suffers its first murder in decades, Zach’s investigation uncovers secrets that tear away the town’s veneer of innocence and force Zach to face the still-open wounds that eviscerated his life.

This is Terrell’s third novel. It follows two well-received Kisti Newcombe legal thrillers, Stars Fall and The First Rule, both of which are still available on Amazon.com. Below is the opening Prologue to Last Train to Stratton.

PROLOGUE

The times when our lives change, when everything before is altered and everything after is different, are seldom recognized as they happen, rarely understood for the ripples that extend beyond the horizon to places we cannot see. Life does not come with highway signposts that warn “Danger Ahead” or “Go Slow,” or perhaps more importantly “Do Not Enter.”

Robert Frost wrote of two roads diverging in a wood, but most watershed junctures are not so obvious, so visible, so tangible. Instead, significance is concealed among daily comings and goings. The import of decisions and events may not appear for years – decades – a lifetime later, when in quiet reflection, we glimpse the ghosts in our memories, discerning faint shadows of people and happenings that, knowingly or unknowingly, shaped not just the path of our lives, but the way we perceive the human experience. 

While the tumultuous 1960s shook the foundations of society, I cruised through those years on a steady, seemingly well-planned course. I was a budding star in the newsroom, my career progress measured in headlines and bylines. My personal life flourished in an isolated singularity of booze, cigarettes, baseball and uncommitted sex.

But beginning in the fall of 1972, my life transformed like shifting tectonic plates that cause the ground to fall away and reveal an unfamiliar world around me. Looking back on a brief window between Nixon’s zenith and the Nation’s Bicentennial, I can see those transformative moments stacking up in my life one upon another like so much cordwood. Some jarred me instantly like a stray hand on high voltage. Others were part of the mundane daily routine, their significance overlooked until long after the concrete had set.

Such was the case in June 1975. My life shattered, I sat in a cluttered office in a western suburb of Chicago, interviewing for a new job for the first time in more than a decade. It was a small-town job, and in its dullness I expected to find a numbing balm for the pain that scorched my life.

I was wrong.