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Book Summary and Reviews of Running from the Dead by Mike Knowles

Running from the Dead by Mike Knowles

Running from the Dead

by Mike Knowles

  • Critics' Consensus (1):
  • Published:
  • Jun 2020, 250 pages
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About this book

Book Summary

Private detective Sam Jones's six-year search for an eight-year-old boy ends with gunshots in a basement and cold bodies that would eventually lead the police straight to him.

Jones had never promised Ruth Verne that he would find her son alive, but he knew deep down that she believed he would ― worse, he had believed it too. Jones wasn't ready to look Ruth in the eye and tell her he had failed. He wasn't ready to admit that he lost everything and had nothing to show for it.

But an unsigned note scrawled on a bathroom door gives Jones a second chance ― a chance for redemption. Thirteen words left by a young girl in trouble give him someone to chase and a reason to keep moving before the cops move on him. Jones follows the trail from an idyllic small town to the darkest corners of the city, running from the boy he failed toward the girl he could still save.

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Reviews

Media Reviews

"[A] brilliantly woven crime novel....The realistic, multidimensional characters evolve, as do their relationships with one another. With any luck, Jones will be back for an encore." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"The noir world evoked by Knowles' brutally clipped prose is so dark that the smallest victories seem like miracles." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Canadian novelist Knowles is a strong writer, with a real sense of what makes bad people tick and what makes good people risk their lives to catch the bad ones. His prose style is top-notch, too — lean, hard-edged, and brutally honest when it needs to be...A must-read crime novel from a writer who deserves to be on the radar screens of a lot more genre readers." - Booklist (starred review)

This information about Running from the Dead was first featured in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.

Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.

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Author Information

Mike Knowles

Mike Knowles lives in Hamilton with his wife, children, and dog. He has written seven previous novels: Darwin's Nightmare, Grinder, In Plain Sight, Never Play Another Man's Game, The Buffalo Job, Rocks Beat Paper, and Tin Men.

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