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.
