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Book Review: The Secret Witness by Victor Methos

RATING: 5 out of 5 Stars

THE SECRET WITNESS (Shepard & Gray Book #1) by Victor Methos is the exciting start to a new crime thriller series set in Utah and featuring a former prosecutor and the new female county sheriff. This book starts off with a bang and keeps the chills and twists coming.

After three vicious murders, Tooele County Sheriff Elizabeth Gray believes she is facing the same serial killer her father, the former sheriff was never able to catch. The Reaper was responsible for a string of vicious murders without leaving any evidence. Elizabeth calls on the friend and retired prosecutor her father trusted while working The Reaper case.

Former prosecutor Solomon Shepard knows about psychopathy. He wrote a preeminent reference book on the subject. He is retired from the Major Crimes prosecutor’s office after a courtroom attack and has become almost a hermit in his apartment. Elizabeth asks for help on the one case that has always haunted Solomon and is the only one with the ability to pull him back into his old life.

As Shepard and Gray investigate the body count grows and they are not sure if they are dealing with the return of the original serial killer or a copycat. They soon find themselves face-to-face with a killer neither expected.

I loved this thriller! The main characters were fully drawn with interesting backstories and a chemistry that worked as well as their partnership. I am very glad this is the start of a series because I really am invested in these characters and looking forward to following them in future books. The subplot with Solomon’s neighbor was heartbreaking and I hate to say realistic. The killer was a surprise, but believable even without the surprise twist at the end. I am always interested in the Nature vs. Nurture psychological arguments in serial crime books. The plot moves at an even and fast pace throughout with plenty of twists and surprises to keep the reader turning the page.

I highly recommend this new crime thriller and I am looking forward to more books in this series!

About the Author

At the age of thirteen, when his best friend was interrogated by the police for over eight hours and confessed to a crime he didn’t commit, Victor Methos knew he would one day become a lawyer.

After graduating from law school at the University of Utah, Methos sharpened his teeth as a prosecutor for Salt Lake City before founding what would become the most successful criminal defense firm in Utah.

In ten years Methos conducted more than one hundred trials. One particular case stuck with him, and it eventually became the basis for his first major bestseller, The Neon Lawyer. Since that time, Methos has focused his work on legal thrillers and mysteries, earning a Harper Lee Prize for The Hallows and an Edgar nomination for Best Novel for his title A Gambler’s Jury. He currently splits his time between southern Utah and Las Vegas.

Social Media Links

Website: https://www.victormethos.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/victor.methos

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The Secret Witness

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THE SECRET WITNESS

by Victor Methos ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2022

A red-hot suspenser aimed at readers for whom a single serial killer just isn’t enough.

A former Utah prosecutor who’s been idling since a defendant he was trying stabbed him in open court comes back to take on one more case that’s gotten well and truly under his skin.

In the eight years since a killer calling himself the Reaper stabbed and shot three victims before murdering a family of five and then going quiet, pretty much everyone in Tooele County has moved on. But not, evidently, the Reaper, who takes three new victims on the anniversaries of the original murders and sends notes bragging about it. Or maybe not, thinks Tooele County Sheriff Billie Gray, who arrests Braden Toby on the strength of powerful evidence. There’s no possibility that Braden, a high school student of 16, was the original Reaper; Billie thinks he’s a narcissistic copycat who’s sought to enlarge his reputation by imitating the Reaper and adding the abduction of Kelly Greer to his idol’s pattern. Billie urges Solomon Shepard, a neighbor of Kelly’s who’s also a homicide prosecutor sidelined ever since his courtroom shanking, to seize the day, and Solomon pressures County Attorney Knox Scott to turn the case over to him. The judge has it in for Solomon. So does one of his own witnesses. And questioning Braden is like throwing pennies into a dark well. So readers will wait with bated breath to see if Solomon will succeed in getting Braden tried as an adult and put away for good. In the end, the recent killings are smartly wound up, the older ones not so much.

Pub Date: July 1, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-54203-818-8

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Review Posted Online: April 11, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022

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LONG SHADOWS

by David Baldacci ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2022

Fascinating main characters and a clever plot add up to an exciting read.

A thriller with bloody murders and plenty of suspects and featuring an unlikely partnership between two FBI investigators.

FBI consultant Amos Decker has a lot on his mind. The huge fellow once played for the Cleveland Browns in the NFL until he received a catastrophic brain injury, leaving him with synesthesia; he sees death as electric blue. More pertinent to the plot, he also has hyperthymesia, or spontaneous and highly accurate recall. On the one hand, his memories can be horrible. He’d once come home to find his wife and daughter murdered, dead in pools of blood. Later, he listens helplessly on the telephone while his ex-partner shoots herself in the mouth. On the other hand, his memory helps him solve every case he's given. Now he's sent to Florida with a brand-new partner, Special Agent Frederica White, to investigate the murder of a federal judge. Both partners are pissed at their last-minute pairing, and they immediately see themselves as a bad fit. White is a diminutive Black single mother of two who has a double black belt in karate “because I hate getting my ass kicked.” (The author doesn't mention Decker's race, but since he's being contrasted with his new partner in every way, perhaps readers are expected to see him as White. Clarity would be nice.) Their case is strange: Judge Julia Cummins was stabbed 10 times and her face covered with a mask, while her bodyguard was shot to death. Decker and White puzzle over the “very contrarian crime scene” where two murders seem to have been committed by two different people in the same place. The plot gets complex, with suspects galore. But the interpersonal dynamic between Decker and White is just as interesting as the solution to the murders, which doesn't come easily. At first, they’d like to be done with each other and go their separate ways. But as they work together, their mutual respect rises and—alas—the tension between them fades almost completely. The pair will make a great series duo, especially if a bit of that initial tension between them returns. And Baldacci shouldn’t give Decker a pass on his tortured memories, because readers enjoy suffering heroes. It's not enough that his near-perfect recall helps him in his job.

Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-5387-1982-4

Page Count: 448

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022

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BRIGHT YOUNG WOMEN

by Jessica Knoll ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 19, 2023

A stunning, engaging subversion of the Bundy myth—and the true-crime genre.

This thinly veiled fictionalization of Ted Bundy’s attack on a Florida State University sorority begins with the horror rather than making it the climax.

As president of her sorority, Pamela Schumacher is used to staying up late to deal with paperwork while her sisters are out partying. The night of Jan. 15, 1978, is no different. Jarred awake at 3 a.m. after having fallen asleep with her clothes on, she hears running footsteps and sees a man heading for the front door. He can’t see her in the shadows—a fact that turns out to save her life, rendering her the only eyewitness to a horrible crime and a notorious criminal, “a man who murdered thirty-five women and escaped prison twice.” The novel goes on to follow several alternating timelines: From Pamela’s perspective, it builds from the day of the sorority murders and also follows her return trip to Tallahassee more than 30 years later in response to a mysterious letter. These chapters are interspersed with the 1974 story of Ruth Wachowsky, believed by her girlfriend, Tina Cannon, to have been one of the killer’s earlier victims. Knoll makes an interesting—and powerful—choice not to name Bundy at any point; Pamela asserts that she “vowed to stop using [his name]” because “there isn’t anything exceptionally clever” about him. Choosing not to name him deflates the myth of the monster, of the charmer, of the criminal genius that people often consider Bundy to be. As the title indicates, this novel belongs to the women: the ones killed because they were too kind to reject an “injured” man asking for help; the ones who lost people they loved; the ones who ultimately had to look him in the eye and not let it destroy their lives. There are twin threads of mystery that lead readers through the maze: the rumor of a suppressed confession tape and Ruth’s story. But in the end, it’s the latter that’s so much more important than the former. In this world of true-crime mania, Knoll knows that every choice—and every name—matters.

Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023

ISBN: 9781501153228

Page Count: 384

Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books

Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023

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Book Review: “The Final Witness” — Just the Facts

By Bob Katz

Strangely, Paul Landis makes no acknowledgment of the implications of the evidence he attests to, namely that neither Lee Harvey Oswald nor any other single gunman could have acted alone.

The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years by Paul Landis. Chicago Review Press, 222 pages, $30.

Moreover, I wonder what it would be like to read this book, subtitled “A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years,” if I had not myself, once upon a time, fervently believed that the JFK assassination was of great importance and that it could, with sufficient resources, be successfully investigated and ultimately solved.

In other words, how would this book read if one accepted it for what it purports to be, the modest memoir of an unheralded individual who, having been thrust dead center into one of the pivotal events of modern American history, happened to notice something that maybe we should all know about.

The story opens with Landis as a recent college graduate living with his parents in Worthington, Ohio. The year is 1957. Vocationally aimless, he signs up with the Ohio Air National Guard. Faced with an empty summer before training begins, he heads out on an extended road trip with a college buddy. Badlands, Yellowstone, Glacier, Mount Rainier, Crater Lake, pitching tent, yakking with strangers, stretching his wings. For a fleeting moment it seemed this excursion was going to accelerate into a fevered Kerouacian quest to grasp the quicksilver essence of our fraught and sprawling nation. That would make for a nifty run-up to a narrative that we realize, spoiler alert baked in, is bound to culminate in an epic nightmare.

Given this subject, readers will be predisposed to look for clues, at the very least clues that Landis realizes his account will be scoured and scrutinized for clues. Alas, he doesn’t make it easy. Young Paul Landis doesn’t seem to be searching for anything beyond a little adventure and a bit of self-actualization.

Hiking along a northern California beach by Highway 101, he witnesses a brutal car accident. Screeching tires, crunched metal, injured passengers by the side of the road. Is this a deft foreshadowing of you know what? “We waited quite a while for the police and an ambulance,” Landis writes drily, “but once they arrived, Paul (his traveling companion) and I gave our statements and we were again on our way.”

I lingered over that for a moment. He gave a statement and was on his way.

After completing his National Guard training, Landis returns to Ohio. He’s living with his parents, working at Wilson’s Men’s Wear, honing his golf game, aimless again. When a family friend who’d become a Secret Service agent stops by for a visit, something clicks. Landis writes, “I began thinking that being able to protect the president of the United States had to be the coolest job in the universe.”

The rest, as they say, is …

Landis fills out an application and is hired so readily, by his telling, as to raise questions concerning the requisite qualifications. Affability? Check. Propensity to follow instructions? Check. Absence of outstanding demerits? Check. At least five foot eight? “I stretched as much as I could without standing on my tiptoes.”

John Landis on CNN talking about his book The Final Witness .

Assigned to the Cincinnati field office, he specializes in check forgeries and takes a rented room with a widowed grandmother who lovingly prepares home-cooked dinners for him even though he doesn’t always come home on time. Can it get any more bland?

Yes it can. Landis is transferred to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he becomes part of the Secret Service detail guarding President Eisenhower’s four grandchildren and, eventually, the president himself. Highlight: Protecting Ike during a round of 18 at the fabled Augusta National Golf Course.

Landis describes all this in a straightforward manner with almost nothing in the way of embellishment, commentary, or personal reflection. Just the facts, Ma’am, is clearly his stylistic preference and seemingly his guiding philosophy. It doesn’t make for scintillating reading and one gets the urge, familiar to fans of pornography, to skip ahead to the good stuff. Because something is brewing. We know it even if there’s nary a hint that guileless SSA Landis knows it.

John F. Kennedy is elected president. Camelot’s in bloom. Landis is assigned to Jackie and the kids. Watching him go about his mundane duties, escorting Caroline as she rides her pony, accompanying Jackie on antiquing expeditions, one wonders what exactly his professional toolkit consists of and what he does to keep himself sharp. Working the midnight shift at the White House, Landis writes, “ Booooring . We were not allowed to read on post, so I used to while away the time counting the holes in the acoustic ceiling tiles outside the Oval Office, or the number of floor tiles in the hallway.”

Official White House photo of President John F. Kennedy. Photo: Wiki Common

The months fly by. “At the end of a summer in Hyannis Port, we would move on to Newport, Rhode Island to visit Mrs. Kennedy’s mother and stepfather … at Hammersmith Farm, the estate where Mrs. Kennedy had grown up. After a month or so in Newport, it was off to Palm Beach for most of the winter. Then, in spring, it would be back to the White House, spending weekends in Middleburg, Virginia (where Jackie has leased an estate.)”

Politics? There’s not much. A glancing reference to the October, 1962, Cuban Missile Crisis is the exception, although this does allow Landis — tellingly? – a segue into the December 29, 1962, trip to the Orange Bowl in Miami where the president was feted by surviving members of Brigade 2506, the CIA-sponsored group of Cuban exiles that had launched a failed attempt in 1961 to overthrow Fidel Castro at the Bay of Pigs.

Cuba. Castro. Bay of Pigs. CIA. Cuban exiles. JFK. Each of these is a potent hashtag in any discussion of the Kennedy assassination. Is Landis at last starting to zero in?

“We had a white Lincoln convertible there,” he writes, “to drive the president and Mrs. Kennedy out of the stadium to their waiting helicopter. I was told to cover the left rear of the car, where I walked and jogged as we departed the Orange Bowl. This was my first OJT [on job training] experience covering a moving vehicle in which the president and the first lady were riding.”

Then it’s on to Texas.

In recounting his super-charged encounter with the events of November 22, 1963, Landis does not deviate from this monotone approach. He was positioned on the right rear running board on the open air convertible directly following the presidential limousine. He heard gunshots. He saw the president’s skull explode in a spray of blood. He leapt into the rear seat of the convertible as the motorcade raced away. Outside Parkland Hospital, he tried to coax a traumatized Jackie, who “was holding what was left of the President’s head in her lap,” to exit the limo. When Jackie finally rose up, he spotted atop the cushioning of the leather seat a completely intact, copper-jacketed bullet. He picked up the bullet. He slipped it into his suit coat pocket. The hospital corridor was a chaotic madhouse. JFK’s lifeless body was moved onto an examining table in Trauma Room #1. “I removed the bullet from my pocket and reaching out over the examination table, I carefully placed it on the white cotton blanket next to the president’s left shoe…. I had saved an important piece of evidence and placed it … where it would be found and prove to be helpful.”

That’s it. Landis has nothing more to add. Having quietly planted a land mine, he walks away with a shrug, dodging even the most obvious, two-plus-two-equals-four type of conclusion. Strangely, he makes no acknowledgment of the implications of the evidence he attests to, namely that neither Lee Harvey Oswald nor any other single gunman could have acted alone.

Without rehashing the whole hornet’s nest of intricate forensic details — look up “magic bullet theory” if you’re interested — Landis’s disclosure that the intact bullet came from President Kennedy and not from Texas Governor John Connally, who was also seated in the limousine and was severely wounded, effectively refutes the official Warren Commission conclusion that one person using the bolt action rifle attributed to Oswald could have fired all the shots in Dealey Plaza during that fatal six-second time frame.

President Kennedy in the limousine in Dallas, on Main Street, minutes before the assassination. Also in the presidential limousine are Jackie Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally, and his wife, Nellie. Date: 22 November 1963. Photo: Wiki Common

So what now, America, 60 years later? Paul Landis’s tale is not Jim Garrison’s A Heritage of Stone . It is not Peter Dale Scott’s Deep Politics and the Death of JFK . It is not Robert Blakey’s The Fatal Hour , or Oliver Stone’s JFK . Declining even to acknowledge that the assassination might be still unsolved, even while presenting something close to proof of exactly that, Landis is not about to speculate as to whodunit. Presumably that will be left to folks who care about such things.

An iconic Getty photo of JFK’s funeral appears on one of the final pages of the book. It shows the Kennedy family grimly gathered outside St. Matthew’s Cathedral on a brisk November morning. Jackie, veiled in black, is flanked by Ted and Bobby, as the fatherless toddler John Jr. gamely salutes the passing casket. Paul Landis stands behind the boy, solemnly looking on.

Landis states he’s waited all these decades to tell his story because the assassination left him traumatized (he quit the secret service the following year) and, having refused to pay any attention to the many controversies about the case, he was therefore unaware of the significance of the bullet he found. We have no choice but to take him at his word.

One gets the sense that by writing this book, SSA Landis believes he’s made good on his assignment. He’s fulfilled his obligation to the truth by taking appropriate steps to enter into the historical record a unique piece of evidence. He writes, “I have shared what I saw, what I did, and only what I know to be factual about that November weekend.”

If the historical record was all that mattered, he indeed would have done his duty.

Bob Katz was a founder of the Assassination Information Bureau, a public interest group that lobbied for a reinvestigation of the JFK and MLK murders. His novel Waiting for Al Gore will be published in February 2024.

14 Comments

This article should be in the New York Times !

How does the third shot “come from behind” if it blows off half of the LEFT side of the president’s head, and sprays blood and grey brain matter all over the agents in the follow-up car, traveling BEHIND? That shot could only come from somewhere in front of the presidential motorcar. Ergo. There were at least two shooters. And…one sinister conspiracy.

Agent Paul Landis, by hiding the bullet in the wrong place, was–in my opinion–woefully neglectful of his duties.

There is no excuse for what he did. None. He has allowed the country to believe a fantasy–the Warren Commission Report–for 60 years!

First off, it was the RIGHT side of the President’s head that was blown off. Second, during the autopsy, Dr. James Humes noted an entrance wound in the right shoulder that went only to his first knuckle. It is certainly conceivable that one of Oswald’s cartridges did not have a full load of gunpowder. And, too, SSA Roy Kellerman, who was in the right front seat of Kennedy’s car, swore under oath that he heard the President say, “My God, I’m hit!” This could have been in reaction to the partial entrance of the bullet that SSA Landis found.

There is one major error in your commentary. You state that Paul Landis “saw the President’s skull explode in a spray of blood. He leapt into the rear seat of the convertible as the motorcade raced away.” That is not true. Agent Clint Hill was the one who leapt onto the rear of the presidential convertible as the motorcade raced away. Clint Hill is the only agent who reacted to the gunshots and tried valiantly to shield the president and Mrs. Kennedy with his body as he was trained to do.

When the president’s head exploded, Paul Landis — the author of this book — writes, “I automatically ducked, not wanting to get splattered as we drove through it.” Not exactly what a Secret Service agent is trained to do, neither is an agent trained to tamper with evidence, as Landis so readily admits.

Thanks for the clarification, Lisa. Clint Hill of course saw more than anyone would want to see that day. I’d be very interested to know his thoughts about Landis’ book.

I should add, Lisa, that the convertible Landis states he leapt into, from his position on the running board, was the follow-up car, and not the Presidential limousine

If only the book were half as interesting as this scalding review. Love the reference to pornography (when is the payoff?)

Actually you may decline to take him at his word, since this account contradicts his past statements (& basic common sense). Probably will sell some books though. A good BS detector might come in handy.

Fair point, Ed. It’s been brought recently to my attention that there are several reasons to be skeptical of Landis’ stated rationale for not divulging his bullet account sooner (essentially that he was unaware of its significance and/or nobody ever asked him about it).

It’s a strange book. At first I wondered whether Landis had been daunted by the potentially staggering implications of his “revelation.” But he never says that, and then the book, ostensibly an attempt to capitalize on the promotional boost derived from revealing his long-held secret, declines to acknowledge any implications or draw any conclusions. Weird.

Thanks. I’d read somewhere there is a well-known JFK assassination book marketing formula: *author had been a participant *tells same basic story but with some plot twist *published at a significant event anniversary

Heard elsewhere that Landis’ ghostwriter or agent has minimized his interaction with the press. Not too compelling, overall.

While I believe Paul had some exciting interactions as a Secret Service agent, I have two major issues with this book. In 1963, the police and secret service were so on their toes that they had a suspect identified and arrested within hours, but Paul did not have the foresight to not tamper with evidence in the limousine. What law enforcement or secret service agent would allow for the removal of a bullet at a shooting, for the limo to be wiped clean and the windshield replaced? And at the shooting of two prominent political figures, to add insult to injury. Let alone thinking that dropping the bullet in trauma room #1 on a gurney is a solution to picking it up in the first place. Again, to echo prior comments, certainly, the training received would teach a person better than that.

The second issue with this book is that it was billed as some explosive insights would be gleaned from reading the book, only to look up after reading what seemed like days, only to find I was 50% through the book and had not even gotten to the assassination. I found myself skipping passages because they were not important to the billing of the book. The title, The Final Witness , implies there was going to be evidentiary information that was not previously told. I was not expecting it to be supportive evidence that NOTHING was handled well on the day of the assassination and the Keystone cops probably did not get much right in this case. I feel this book was nothing more than a money grab with another anniversary coming soon, dangling the carrot for those hungry for the truth. The one good thing that can be stated is the photos were solid evidence he was present during this time. But again, most are published photos that are not new. Sorry would not recommend the read.

Fully agree with the criticisms. I should have been skeptical when the only reviews on the book’s jacket came from those who participated in its creation. The deceptive title gives the strong implication that the reader will come away with an “Aha!” moment. That never occurs.

He says he heard three shots. How does that relate to the unfired bullet he found, if at all? And yes, it was erroneous not to make sure forensics got that bullet.

Finally, he comments that if he had the chance, he would have shot Oswald himself. Really? Then how could the information that really would have explained things ever come to light? To me, that suggests he believes Oswald was the villain.

I bought the book because my time at Ohio Wesleyan overlapped his, & anr article appeared in their monthly newsletter. We did not know each other, but I knew of him. Knowing what I now know, I would not have bought the book. I gave it to our local library, so at least some others won’t have to pay for it. Bill Ackerman

The fourth bullet is a major problem for the government. I would bet that the bullet in question was the first shot, came from the front and entered the President in the center of his neck. Having pierced the windshield off center and about 2 or 3 inches from the top. Entering above the Adam’s Apple and clearing any bone. Exiting having moved only through soft tissue.

While it is undeniable that the Secret Service was in league with the CIA, the FBI and the Chiefs of Staff, agents were on a need to know basis. The guys at the top had to be running the exit from Dallas. They had the body. But the fine brave agents of the service were in the dark. Agent Landis may not have been ready to be the guy that was going to get involved in the Frey until most of the conspirators were dead.

The only thing I gleaned from Landis’ revelation is that POSSIBLY, the first bullet struck JFK in the back but was undercharged and only penetrated a few inches of flesh next to his spinal column. JFK’s reaction was not throat grabbing but what Doctors call the Thornburn Reflex which can occur during an upper spinal injury or stimulation. Remember, it was later determined that the impact of the bullet caused a slight vibration fracture in JFK’s vertebrae. Going with this theory, the second bullet missed JFK but struck Connally causing all his injuries. The third bullet then struck JFK’s head and a fragment of the exploding bullet caused his throat injury as the bullet and skull fragments splintered outward. That last shot’s impact MAY have dislodged the bullet in JFK’s back and it landed where Landis claims it did. That is the only alternate narrative I could conceive of with all the evidence and testimony I have seen and read. And that is only if Landis is telling the truth.

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The Secret Witness Paperback – July 1 2022

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From the bestselling author of A Killer’s Wife comes the thrilling first installment in the Shepard & Gray series, featuring a young sheriff who teams up with a former prosecutor to stop a copycat killer.

This is Reaper speaking.

So begins an anonymous letter published in a Utah newspaper after a young couple is viciously murdered. Tooele County sheriff Elizabeth Gray leads the investigation into the double homicide, which is eerily reminiscent of a string of brutal killings years ago. When the letter leads detectives to yet another body, Gray calls on an old friend for help.

Former prosecutor Solomon Shepard is still struggling to recover from the deadly courtroom attack that ended his career. He’s been keeping a safe distance from the action, teaching criminology seminars about serial murders and psychopathology―until Gray asks for his help on the Reaper case.

As the body count mounts, Shepard and Gray race to unravel the deranged design of a copycat killer―and find themselves in a face-off with an enemy they never saw coming.

Book 1 of 3 Shepard & Gray
Print length 304 pages
Language English
Publication date July 1 2022
Dimensions 13.97 x 2.54 x 20.96 cm
ISBN-10 1542038189
ISBN-13 978-1542038188
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About the author.

At the age of thirteen, when his best friend was interrogated by the police for over eight hours and confessed to a crime he didn’t commit, Victor Methos knew he would one day become a lawyer.

After graduating from law school at the University of Utah, Methos cut his teeth as a prosecutor for Salt Lake City before founding what would become the most successful criminal defense firm in Utah.

In ten years, Methos conducted more than one hundred trials. One particular case stuck with him, and it eventually became the basis for his first major bestseller, The Neon Lawyer. Since that time, Methos has focused his work on legal thrillers and mysteries, winning the Harper Lee Prize for The Hallows and an Edgar nomination for Best Novel for his title A Gambler’s Jury. He currently splits his time between southern Utah and Las Vegas.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Thomas & Mercer (July 1 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1542038189
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1542038188
Item weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 kg
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 2.54 x 20.96 cm
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The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray, 1) Audio CD – Unabridged, 1 July 2022

This is Reaper speaking.

As the body count mounts, Shepard and Gray race to unravel the deranged design of a copycat killer—and find themselves in a face-off with an enemy they never saw coming.

Book 1 of 3 Shepard & Gray
Language English
Publisher Brilliance Audio
Publication date 1 July 2022
Dimensions 13.97 x 0.64 x 17.78 cm
ISBN-10 1713652102
ISBN-13 978-1713652106
See all details

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Brilliance Audio; Unabridged edition (1 July 2022)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1713652102
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1713652106
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 13.97 x 0.64 x 17.78 cm

About the author

Victor methos.

At the age of thirteen, when his best friend was interrogated by the police for over eight hours and confessed to a crime he didn’t commit, Victor Methos knew he would one day become a lawyer.

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Customers find the storyline brilliant and riveting. They also praise the writing style as well-written, concise, and plausible. Readers love the characters and the story grips them from page one. Opinions differ on the interest level, with some finding it keeps their interest throughout, while others find it uninteresting.

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Customers find the storyline brilliant, riveting, and interesting. They also say the book has nice twists and turns with an unusual hero.

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The Secret Agent

September 19, 2024 issue

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Creation Lake

On November 11, 2008, 150 police officers surrounded the tiny village of Tarnac, in central France. They had come to arrest members of a small leftist commune that had been operating a farm, along with a general store and a bar, for the previous four years. The charge was terrorism, or rather being part of an “association of wrongdoers in relation to a terrorist undertaking”—in this case the use of iron rods to disrupt several high-speed rail lines in the area.

Industrial sabotage is a venerable French tradition; the rods had caused significant delays, but there had been no chance of anyone getting hurt. It quickly became clear that the Tarnac Nine—as the main suspects were known—had been taken into custody for another reason, namely that government officials believed they were behind a political tract called The Coming Insurrection , written by a group going by comité invisible , or the Invisible Committee.

Published in 2007, The Coming Insurrection is an anticapitalist, anarchist treatise that advocates for the formation of autonomous communities, or communes, as a means of building resistance to state power. It’s written in a punchy, confrontational style with no shortage of bons mots: “The economy is not ‘in’ crisis, the economy is itself the crisis.” “We are not depressed; we’re on strike.” “An authentic pacifism cannot mean refusing weapons, but only refusing to use them….It’s only in an extreme position of strength that we are freed from the need to fire.” The book caught the attention of the American conservative pundit Glenn Beck, who held up a copy of it on his Fox News show. “It is a dangerous book,” Beck insisted. “Don’t dismiss these people. Don’t dismiss them.”

Over in France, the Invisible Committee attracted the notice of Alain Bauer, a professor of criminology whom then president Nicolas Sarkozy had hired to help create a national security council. Bauer, a onetime consultant to Lafarge, the world’s largest cement manufacturer, discovered The Coming Insurrection on the shelves at the retail chain FNAC , which is a bit like finding Manufacturing Consent at Best Buy. He bought forty copies and mailed them to various intelligence professionals, thus kicking off a sting operation that led to the arrests at Tarnac and involved wiretapping and document forging as part of the effort to build the government’s case. It also involved using The Coming Insurrection as evidence of the group’s terrorist intent.

Nearly ten years later the Tarnac Nine were acquitted of the most serious charges. Julien Coupat and Yildune Lévy, two prominent members of the group, were convicted of refusing to submit to DNA testing. L’affaire de Tarnac is generally considered an embarrassment to France’s counterterrorism program, an absurd instance of government overreach and red-scare hysteria. However, as the poet Jean-Marie Gleize puts it in his 2011 collection Tarnac, un acte préparatoire ( Tarnac, a Preparatory Act ), the reality is far more foreboding. When books are used as “evidence of opinions” to incriminate their authors or readers, and when any relationship between two or more people, “even love or friendship,” can be said to constitute a gang or a cell, we are not seeing a democratic government take national security too far; we are seeing an authoritarian state show its true face. “It would be illusory,” Gleize writes, “to demand that this procedural regime be applied in/manners less broad or less brutal: it is designed to be/applied precisely as it is.”

When the trial at last concluded, the presiding magistrate, Corinne Goetzmann, declared: “Le groupe de Tarnac était une fiction”—the Tarnac group was a fiction. In Creation Lake , Rachel Kushner tells a story about a group very much like the Tarnac Nine, and about the spy-for-hire who infiltrates its ranks. The book is at once a thriller, a history of the French left, a survey of academic theories about the prehistoric age, and a philosophical novel about human nature. It is also a dazzling work of fiction: brisk, stylish, funny, moving, and, unexpectedly, piercingly moral.

The narrator of Creation Lake goes by the alias Sadie Smith. She is a freelance secret agent who works for governments and corporations, and she specializes in entrapping left-wing activists. A recent assignment for the FBI did not turn out as planned, and Sadie has a lot riding on her current mission. That mission is to gain the trust of Pascal Balmy, the leader of a group of French anarchists who run a commune called Le Moulin, made up mostly of former graduate students from Paris plus a few hangers-on. Le Moulin lies in the Guyenne, in southwestern France. There its members farm (not very well), take care of their children (not very well), and (more successfully) help run a small bar in town.

Meanwhile Sadie is also supposed to bring about the demise, one way or another, of the unpopular politician Paul Platon, Spanish by birth and France’s deputy minister of “rural coherence.” (What the first task has to do with the second becomes clearer as the novel unfolds.) Some of these characters are based on real people. Platon, so obnoxious his own driver hopes he gets killed, is the spitting image of Manuel Valls, the gaffe-prone prime minister of France between 2014 and 2016 and, before that, the minister of the interior.

Pascal resembles Julien Coupat, the most high-profile member of the Tarnac Nine. Like Coupat, Pascal comes from a good bourgeois family—it’s his inheritance that purchased Le Moulin—and was once questioned in relation to the bombing of an army recruitment center in Times Square. Sadie reports that Pascal is sometimes compared to the radical French writer and filmmaker Guy Debord, on whom Coupat wrote his dissertation. Both Coupat and Pascal have Debord’s “signature hairstyle”—“short, even bangs over a high forehead.” As for the Moulinards, they’ve been involved in multiple acts of so-called ecotage, including the disruption of the TGV , France’s high-speed rail line.

Creation Lake is also populated by a cluster of minor characters. There is Sadie’s new husband, Lucien, who is Pascal’s old school chum, a filmmaker, and Sadie’s ticket to Pascal’s inner circle; Lucien’s aunt Agathe and uncle Robert, caretakers of the old farmhouse where Sadie sets up operations in the Guyenne; Nadia, a disgruntled former Moulinard; Françoise and Denis, veteran activists scorned by Pascal; Burdmoore, an American ex-con and a strange presence at Le Moulin; and Vito, the boyfriend of Lucien’s collaborator, Serge, and Sadie’s only friend. In the rearview mirror are Nancy and “the boy with the chin-line beard,” the targets of Sadie’s inglorious last sting, to whom her thoughts are often reluctantly drawn.

The novel’s center of gravity, however, is Bruno Lacombe, a once-prominent French radical and associate of Debord’s who lives, or so he says, underground, in a series of primeval caves beneath the forests of the Guyenne. Now in his seventies, Bruno first came to the region after becoming disillusioned with politics following the student uprisings of 1968. “None of these eruptions,” Sadie notes, “had resulted in the overthrow of capitalism in any of the advanced industrial nations of the entire European continent—not a single one.” “In the wake of the colossal failure of leftist revolt” Bruno moved to the countryside, convinced that capitalism could not be directly dismantled but instead had to be abandoned, and another way of life built outside and beyond it.

When Creation Lake begins, Bruno is the Moulinards’ unofficial guru, an “anti-civver” whose rejection of modern life inspires their own back-to-the-land brand of nonviolent ecotage. Despite having forsaken most forms of technology, he still has access to e-mail, which he uses to send Pascal and the group regular correspondence about human prehistory and his personal hobbyhorse, the Neanderthals. Drawing on a mixture of extensive scholarly research and intuitive conjecture, Bruno has decided that the Neanderthals were a superior life-form to Homo sapiens , that “interglacial bully who shaped the world we’re stuck with.” “Thal,” as Bruno calls him, was more creative and less violent than his genetic relative, modern man, who is currently hurtling “toward extinction in a shiny, driverless car,” his own “death drive” behind the wheel.

When Sadie, who has hacked into Bruno’s and Le Moulin’s e-mail accounts, begins reading his missives, she greets them with a professional skeptic’s hard-boiled indifference:

At first I wondered if these emails about the Neanderthal were a prank, as if Bruno had planted them for whoever had gained access to his account, to divert them from his actual correspondence with Pascal and the Moulinards.

Neanderthals, for Sadie, are “a species who, let’s face it, could not hack it, or they’d be here still, and they weren’t.” Gradually, however, Bruno gets to her. Eating some grapes by the side of the road, she remembers that Bruno “had said the old Occitan name for this region…was the Aguienne Neire,” neire meaning black and perhaps referring “to black walnuts and black grapes.” “Here I was,” she observes, “tasting these local grapes, as sweet as he claimed.”

Behind her growing sympathy for Bruno is a fact of which the Moulinards, to Sadie’s surprise, are unaware. To them, Bruno’s flight underground is simply an extreme application of his political principles, eccentric but admirable. Sadie knows something they don’t, which is that Bruno went to live in the caves only after the accidental death of his young daughter, crushed beneath the tractor Bruno was teaching her to drive. “In my cave,” writes Bruno, “I hear voices”—of ancient humans, of Cathars and other heretics hiding from persecution, of Resistance fighters “who retreated underground to hide from rampaging Germans”:

Cave bandwidth crosses moments, eras, epochs, eons. You have to learn to get inside the monophony, to tease it apart. Eventually, you encounter an extraordinary polyphony. You begin to sort, to filter. You hear whispers, laughter, murmurs, pleas. There’s a feeling that everyone is here…. Suddenly you realize how alone we have been, how isolated, to be trapped, stuck in calendar time, and cut off from everyone who came before us.

“Bruno was some kind of lunatic,” the rationalist Sadie decides. “At the same time, I could not help but see his discussions of cave frequency as a naked expression of grief. He was down there looking for his dead daughter, convincing himself he heard her voice.”

Kushner doesn’t share Sadie’s desire to reduce Bruno’s political ideas to his personal tragedy. For her, ideas are no less real than feelings, abstract principles no less compelling than intimate attachments. Her previous full-length novels— Telex from Cuba , The Flamethrowers , The Mars Room —are about the ways individual lives are constrained by historical forces much too large for anyone to grasp completely. These books are structured according to a belief that everything about our world—from how we dress to the jobs we work to the kinds of government we have—is to some extent determined by the time we live in and, more to the point, by the economic system specific to that time.

Karl Marx called this belief (or a version of it) historical materialism, and in his 1916 study The Theory of the Novel the Marxist philosopher and literary critic György Lukács argued that works of art, too, have features that are exemplary of this or that era in the history of human society. In ancient Greece, Lukács said, people thought of themselves both as part of nature and as belonging completely to their communities. This has consequences for the way characters are presented in literature. Odysseus and Achilles have definite traits (smart and sneaky, hot-tempered), but they don’t seem like individuals with irreducibly rich interior lives.

By contrast, Jane Austen’s heroines or James Baldwin’s antiheroes remind us of ourselves because, like us, they feel alienated from the world in which they must live and act, and from other people too. They are isolated by and within their homes, their families, their jobs, their cities or towns, and, above all, their own heads. Their private thoughts are more tangible to them than anything having to do with society at large, even as they may try, desperately, to connect with others through love or activism or art or sex. For these characters, what Lukács calls “the outside world” remains inert. It acquires “life only when [it] can be related either to the life-experiencing interiority of the individual…or to the observing and creative eye” of the novelist herself.

This description serves pretty well when it comes to the modern American novel. Think of Don DeLillo’s Jack and Babette Gladney in White Noise , a husband and wife who remain radically disconnected from their environment and from each other, even as a toxic chemical spill threatens to obliterate any boundary between their bodies and the poisoned air. In White Noise , as in DeLillo’s greatest novel, Underworld , history itself is the main character, if by “history” we understand the mood or tone of a distinctive time and place—the pharmaceutical haze and suburban dissociation of the 1980s, the nuclear dread and crumbling innocence of the postwar period.

Kushner often cites DeLillo as an influence, but Creation Lake most clearly bears the imprint of a handful of European writers, including the Italian novelist and poet Nanni Balestrini and the French crime novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette. The first chapter of Manchette’s 1976 novel Le Petit Bleu de la côte ouest ( Three to Kill ) begins, “And sometimes what used to happen was what is happening now,” before launching into a description of Manchette’s protagonist, Georges Gerfaut, a middle-class nobody caught up in murder:

The reason why Georges is barreling along the outer ring road, with diminished reflexes, listening to this particular music, must be sought first and foremost in the position occupied by Georges in the social relations of production. The fact that Georges has killed at least two men in the course of the last year is not germane. What is happening now used to happen from time to time in the past.

In her introduction to a 2016 English translation of Balestrini’s We Want Everything , an electric account of Italy’s “Hot Autumn” of workers’ strikes in 1969, Kushner observed that his narrators—who are often nameless—“are always one person speaking anonymously as a type.” Their “voices,” she continues,

have all the specificity of an individual—a set of attitudes, moods, prejudices, back stories, but they each speak in a way that exemplifies what life was like for a person such as them , in a moment when there were many like them.

Paradoxically, this anonymity works against the sense of alienation Lukács described—at least in the domain of literature. If capitalism creates a world in which human beings are violently atomized, cut off from one another by the daily demands of wage labor and the barriers of class society, the character who speaks at once for himself and for everyone like him represents the possibility of a world in which we might be both singular and plural, both fully, freely ourselves and part of a multitude of interdependent, mutually supportive lives.

Kushner’s characters often have an intentionally imprecise quality. Reno, the narrator of The Flamethrowers , is so named because she’s from Reno, Nevada, and while she is in many ways unusual—an art-school graduate who happens to be a skilled motorcyclist—there is a vagueness to her. “I was passing through,” she says at one point. “A girl who would be around every day for a spell, and then one day be gone.” When Reno is caught up in Italy’s uprisings of 1977, largely driven by the leftist Autonomia Operaia (Workers’ Autonomy) movement, her passivity is turned toward radical ends. “I did not think of myself as someone who needed to make decisions,” she says. “I was, instead, one of the people in [an]…apartment where so many congregated…. I was part of the rage and celebration.”

Romy Hall, the protagonist of The Mars Room , is also importantly generic while still being skillfully drawn. A woman serving back-to-back life sentences for killing her stalker, she could arguably be any of us. While The Mars Room is a novel and not a polemic, it uses the rhetorical and imaginative powers of fiction to make an argument for prison abolition. As Kushner put it in an interview, when it comes to debates about mass incarceration, “focusing on the individual story is such a part of the liberal fantasy of our ‘broken system.’” The problem is not that sometimes the system punishes people who don’t deserve to be punished; the problem is the logic of punishment itself.

By making “one character,” say Romy or Reno, “a conduit through which a history can flow,” Kushner tweaks without wholly abandoning the conventions of realist fiction. She preserves the novel’s basic formal features—individuated characters, linear plot, a more or less stable narrative voice—while making them seem strange or unfamiliar. In this she represents an important trend within contemporary fiction. Like Éric Vuillard, Joseph Andras, Stephanie LaCava, and Ana Schnabl, she writes books that are intensely political without being didactic, and whose faintly hallucinatory quality mirrors the incomprehensibility and cruel distortions of the systems that control our lives.

Spy and detective novels, like all forms of genre fiction, thrive on the opacity of their characters, who are always more type than individual. What do we know about James Bond other than his small arsenal of flat habits (martinis, promiscuity, quips)? As Dashiell Hammett said of Sam Spade, he “had no original” but is rather “a dream man” reduced almost entirely to two things: being “a hard and shifty fellow” and a prolific drinker. Of Philip Marlowe, another lush, Raymond Chandler said he “just grew out of the pulps. He was no one person.”

Sadie Smith is also no one person. She is, in a sense, no person at all. Her name is made up, and she likes to tell people that she’s from a place called Priest Valley, a real place in California with a population (she says) of zero. She’s in the habit of hinting to the reader that her breasts are fake, a piece of information that becomes a synecdoche for her sexuality. Whether she’s honey-trapping Lucien or falling into bed with the loutish René, one of the Moulinards, Sadie’s desires are always simulated, a means to an end and not a source of pleasure or joy. What she does like, however, is booze, and the more-than-occasional benzo. “I am a better driver after a few drinks,” she insists, “more focused.”

Sadie spends most of Creation Lake buzzed, but it never really affects her abilities. She is unforgivingly perceptive, with no patience for sentimentality. That doesn’t mean, however, that she has no morals. Sadie describes the cold facts of modern life—the life to which Bruno and the Moulinards so passionately object—without any editorial hand-wringing, almost as if they don’t bother her. But when we consider how fine-tuned her observations are and how wide an ambit of the world’s misery they include, we begin to understand what Manchette meant when he called crime fiction “the great moral literature of our time.”

In one early passage Sadie, who has pulled over by the side of the road to pee, offers a razor-sharp appraisal of contemporary Europe based on the sight of “a pair of women’s Day-Glo-orange underpants snagged in the bushes at eye level.” “Truck ruts and panties snagged on a bush: that’s ‘Europe,’” Sadie remarks. Despite what tourists believe,

the real Europe is not a posh café on the rue de Rivoli with gilded frescoes and little pots of famous hot chocolate…. The real Europe is a borderless network of supply and transport. It is shrink-wrapped palettes of superpasteurized milk or powdered Nesquik or semiconductors…. It is windowless distribution warehouses, where unseen men, Polish, Moldovan, Macedonian, back up their empty trucks and load goods that they will move through a giant grid called “Europe,” a Texas-sized parcel of which is called “France.”

As for the orange panties, Sadie imagines they belonged to

a girl or woman fallen on hard times, not French, and without EU documents, stuck in a rural outpost, picking her way out to the main road in impractical high-heeled shoes of flesh-biting imitation leather, aloe in her purse for rapid-fire hand jobs…. The panties hanging on a bush in front of my face are a package of three for five euros at Carrefour. They are like Kleenex. You sweat or leak or bleed into them and then toss them on a bush, or in the trash, or you flush them and clog the plumbing, someone else’s plumbing, ideally.

At once terse and vivid, economical and expansive, Kushner’s prose here moves between global capital and hyperlocalized suffering, from Europe’s “giant grid” to the clear and present scene of what Sadie will come to call the “Tomb of the Unknown Hooker.” The paragraphs obviously indict a world “full of disposability,” but they are also just great writing: true, funny, sad, shrewd, and beautifully controlled through each unyielding sentence.

The mistreatment of women is a subtle but powerful current running through Creation Lake . When Sadie visits Le Moulin, she finds the Moulinards have created a society that seems far from revolutionary. The women on the commune are cooking and looking after children while the men discuss politics and tactics and work in the library. When Sadie confronts Pascal, he shrugs her off. It just happened that way, he says, and “we don’t have a magic solution.” Sadie later hears from Nadia, who says she was thrown out of Le Moulin for being too old and that Pascal is a womanizer particularly interested in young girls. “They talk about their supposed ethics,” Nadia sneers, “but none of it applies to him.”

The moral core of Creation Lake is Bruno, but it’s Sadie whose unblinkered gaze allows his vision to shine through both the posturing of the Moulinards and the grim canopy of the EU, with its windowless warehouses and treacherous rest stops. “Look up,” Bruno writes in one of his e-mails to Pascal and his associates. “The roof of the world is open.” Sadie, who likes facts, might put it a bit differently. She might say that the oldest hominids appeared on earth as early as seven million years ago, and this means that humanity is both very old and very young. Its story—wild, improbable, immense—isn’t over yet.

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Life-size dinosaurs, a candy store tour and more to do this weekend

Take a road tip to Wiscasset for art, food, car racing and a gargantuan amount of candy.

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One of many dinosaurs that will be at Cross Insurance Arena in Portland. Photo courtesy of Jurassic Quest

Make no bones about it, it’s going to be a great weekend, starting with Jurassic Quest at Cross Insurance Arena . Animatronic dinosaurs will delight the kids, who will also get a kick out of digging for fossils and riding on a baby dino. Another option in our weekly roundup is “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” at the Maine State Music Theatre in Brunswick.

‘Beautiful’ at Maine State Music Theatre, Pet Rock in the Park and Jurassic Quest

Some of the candy available at the Granite Hall Store in Round Pond. Photo by Aimsel Ponti

For an even sweeter experience, we’re sending you candy shopping. We’ve shined a light on five shops with something extra to offer and created a nifty guide of 18 to look you can find all around southern Maine and the Midcoast. From giant shops like Sweetz & More in Wiscasset to charming places like the Granite Hall Store in Round Pond, there’s a candy shop out there calling your name.

These 5 unique Maine candy stores are a real treat

The Brackett’s Market 4-Cylinder Pros compete Saturday at Wiscasset Speedway. Anna Chadwick/Morning Sentinel

Should your sweets-seeking adventure bring you to Wiscasset, we clue you into several other things to do in town, including car races at the Wiscasset Speedway.

A trip to pretty Wiscasset can also include art, history, speed

Bagel sandwich with eggs, cheese and pork roll from Dutchman’s Wood-Fired Bagels in Brunswick. Photo by Aimsel Ponti

Want to hit breakfast right out of the park? Make your way to Brunswick for an egg and cheese sandwich from Dutchman’s Wood-Fired Bagels . We’re particularly partial to the one with pork roll and bodega sauce. Your taste buds can thank us later.

Pork roll and bodega sauce on a breakfast sandwich? We’re not in Brunswick anymore

Ling-Wen Tsai, “Rising/Sinking Study Chair,” wood and milk paint, 12 x 12 x 5 inches. Photo courtesy of Corey Daniels Gallery

Farther south in Wells, check out “Life Forms,” a women’s sculpture collective at the Corey Daniels Gallery. You’ll see works by about a dozen artists as you make your way through the exhibit.

Women’s sculpture collective debuts work in Wells

U.S. Navy Band Country Current performing in Tennessee. Photo by Petty Officer 1st Class April Enos

For some Sunday afternoon live tunes, head to Memorial Park in Freeport at 3 p.m. for a free performance by Country Current . The band is the only U.S. Navy country/bluegrass ensemble, and the show should be a foot-stomping good time.

See U.S. Navy band Country Current for free in Freeport

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The Secret Witness: Shepard & Gray, Book 1 Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

This is Reaper speaking.

As the body count mounts, Shepard and Gray race to unravel the deranged design of a copycat killer—and find themselves in a face-off with an enemy they never saw coming.

Book 1 of 3 Shepard & Gray
Listening Length 8 hours and 5 minutes
Author Victor Methos
Narrator Timothy Andrés Pabon
Audible release date July 1, 2022
Language English
Publisher Brilliance Audio
ASIN B09TBJFWY6
Version Unabridged
Program Type Audiobook
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Listening Length	8 hours and 5 minutes
Author
Narrator
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	July 01, 2022
Publisher
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B09TBJFWY6
Best Sellers Rank	#20,139 in Audible Books & Originals ( ) #519 in #618 in #1,732 in

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Customers find the plot great, chilling, and interesting. They also praise the writing quality as excellent and the characters as well developed. Opinions are mixed on the storyline, pacing, content, and paciness. Some find it interesting, while others say it's boring and dark. Readers also have mixed feelings about the content, with some finding it insightful and fantastic, while other find the details graphic and unnecessary.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the plot intriguing, with many different layers and themes. They also say the ending is unexpected, but added a whole new element to the story. Readers mention that the book is entertaining and a page-turner until the end. They describe the crimes as chilling and taut.

"...The ending was a shock . Sometimes I get bored with books and wonder if I'm ever going to get to the end. I did not feel that way with this book...." Read more

"...As usual in the first novel in a series, the B-storyline is quite rich ...." Read more

"...It's a little on the dark side, but the storyline is strong and makes the events necessary to the unfolding of the narrative...." Read more

"...This book was good. Really good. The plot was excellent . Except… That people kept returning from the dead. Literally...." Read more

Customers find the writing quality of the book excellent, well written, and engaging. They also say the author is fantastic and does very well at setting scenes, describing crime, and taking readers to court.

"This is a really good book . When I had to stop reading to go and do other things, I could hardly wait to get back to it, to read more...." Read more

"I liked the characters in this mystery and also the writing was good ...." Read more

"Victor Methos is one of my favorite authors. This book was good . Really good. The plot was excellent...." Read more

"...some people might say this is a strange thing to say but I found the book entertaining and the writing is just so well done...." Read more

Customers find the characters believable.

"...The character of Kelly also was well developed in this thread...." Read more

" Interesting characters . I would have loved to hear more of Billie’s backstory, but didn’t mind the focus being kept on the plot either...." Read more

"...Good suspense, good storyline, intrigue, and characters ...." Read more

"...you will like this book by Victor Methos, as it is quick paced with likable characters . Solomon and Billie are my favorites...." Read more

Customers have mixed opinions about the storyline. Some find it interesting and disturbing, with excellent court room banter and strategy. They also appreciate the non-stop action and surprising twist. However, others find the book boring, difficult to read, and sad.

"...I did not feel that way with this book. It held my interest from the beginning to the end. I've read 15 books this summer...." Read more

"...to help the reader understand what’s happening, but do not become overwrought or boring . This story is complex but really accessible...." Read more

"...So, the prose is no pleasure to read .The content is problematic...." Read more

"Wow, what a book! It took my breath away. Non-stop action . I love crime /courtroom thrillers. Reading the next book in line of this series...." Read more

Customers are mixed about the pacing. Some find the book well paced and flowing smoothly, while others find the first half slow going. They also say the resolution is too fast and the courtroom scenes drag a bit. Overall, some find the resolution overdone and predictable.

"... Everything wrapped up nicely , and all questions were answered. I definitely enjoyed this and I’ll be reading the rest of the series." Read more

"...I also felt that the story's pace was a problem; it was tediously slow in parts and rushed in others...." Read more

"Book 1 (Shepard & Gray) Very good psychological thriller. Fast pace with twist and turns ...." Read more

"...I thought Billie and Solomon worked well together. The story moved quickly which meant I never wanted to put it down...." Read more

Customers are mixed about the content. Some find the book very insightful, with kind context clues. They also say the research was true to form, and the book is full of test and disturbing moments. However, others say the writing is choppy, unexplaining, and unbelieveable. They feel the topic is gruesome and the details are almost too graphic.

"...This may seem kind a nitpicky, but the book summary is confusing . I know that the writer has no control over how GR describes a book...." Read more

"...You can tell the writer had a legal background as the research was true to form . I will definitely read more of this author's books!" Read more

"...Just not my cup of tea.The writing is a bit choppy and often unexplaining . I did enjoy the characters of the prosecutor, sheriff and mother...." Read more

"...Everything wrapped up nicely, and all questions were answered . I definitely enjoyed this and I’ll be reading the rest of the series." Read more

Customers are mixed about the page-turning ability of the book. Some mention it's hard to put down and easy to follow, while others find it tedious to read.

"Suspenseful and made me want to keep reading. Book was hard to put down ! I want to read the other two books." Read more

"...The secobd time not as much but still had a rough time putting the book down since the story pulls you in." Read more

"...They work well together.The characters are complex, complicated and well fleshed out and the story just WOW!..." Read more

"...I found it hard to put down and entertaining until the end. I even appreciated the attempts at humor with the character Solomon...." Read more

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IMAGES

The Secret Witness (Paperback)
Secret Witness 9781491751176
Ormond; Or, The Secret Witness. Volume 1 (Of 3) de Charles Brockden
The Witness
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SET OF 2: THE WITNESS-THE AGENT

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#Becoming Christ witness# Book of Esther#
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SHOCKING COURTROOM DRAMA! Michael Cardwell's Secret Witness Revelation in Custody Battle Exposed!

COMMENTS

The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray #1) by Victor Methos
"The Secret Witness" is book 1 in a new series by author, Victor Methos. Volume 2, "The Grave Singer" is due out in May 2023. Methos is a well published author of courtroom drama and investigative thrillers and this story fits the genre perfectly.
The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray Book 1)
The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray Book 1) Kindle Edition . by Victor Methos (Author) Format: Kindle Edition. 4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 31,210 ratings. ... This review though is about Secret Witness which is the starting book of a new series featuring Elizabeth Gray... Sheriff Billie Gray and Solomon Shepard, a former prosecutor who seems to ...
THE SECRET WITNESS
First-timer Willingham laces her first-person narrative with a stifling sense of victimhood that extends even to the survivors and a series of climactic revelations, at least some of which are guaranteed to surprise the most hard-bitten readers. The story is sadly familiar, the treatment claustrophobically intense. 10.
The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray Book 1)
This review though is about Secret Witness which is the starting book of a new series featuring Elizabeth Gray... Sheriff Billie Gray and Solomon Shepard, a former prosecutor who seems to understand what goes on inside these murder's minds.
Book Review: The Secret Witness by Victor Methos
THE SECRET WITNESS (Shepard & Gray Book #1) by Victor Methos is the exciting start to a new crime thriller series set in Utah and featuring a former prosecutor and the new female county sheriff. This book starts off with a bang and keeps the chills and twists coming. After three vicious murders, Tooele County Sheriff Elizabeth Gray believes she ...
Shepard & Gray Series by Victor Methos
Book 1. The Secret Witness. by Victor Methos. 4.18 · 21058 Ratings · 825 Reviews · published 2022 · 7 editions. From the bestselling author of A Killer's Wife com ... 4.23 · 4198 Ratings · 191 Reviews · published 2023 · 7 editions. From the bestselling author of A Killer's Wife com ...
The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray)
The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray) Paperback - July 1, 2022. by Victor Methos (Author) 4.3 30,900 ratings. Book 1 of 3: Shepard & Gray. See all formats and editions. From the bestselling author of A Killer's Wife comes the thrilling first installment in the Shepard & Gray series, featuring a young sheriff who teams up with a former ...
The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray, book 1) by Victor Methos
The Secret Witness (2022) (The first book in the Shepard & Gray series) A novel by Victor Methos . From the bestselling author of A Killer's Wife comes the thrilling first installment in the Shepard & Gray series, featuring a young sheriff who teams up with a former prosecutor to stop a copycat killer.
THE SECRET WITNESS
Four residents of Coopers Chase, a British retirement village, compete with the police to solve a murder in this debut novel. The Thursday Murder Club started out with a group of septuagenarians working on old murder cases culled from the files of club founder Elizabeth Best's friend Penny Gray, a former police officer who's now comatose in the village's nursing home.
The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray Book 1) Kindle Edition
The Secret Witness by Victor Methos starts out as a thriller about a serial killer then somewhat abruptly turns into a courtroom drama part way through. ... 5.0 out of 5 stars Secret Witness Review. Reviewed in the United States on 20 February 2024. Verified Purchase.
The Secret Witness
The Secret Witness. From the bestselling author of A Killer's Wife comes the thrilling first installment in the Shepard & Gray series, featuring a young sheriff who teams up with a former prosecutor to stop a copycat killer. This is Reaper speaking. So begins an anonymous letter published in a Utah newspaper after a young couple is viciously ...
The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray #1) by Victor Methos
From the bestselling author of A Killer's Wife comes the thrilling first installment in the Shepard & Gray series, featuring a young sheriff who teams up with a former prosecutor to stop a copycat killer.. This is Reaper speaking. So begins an anonymous letter published in a Utah newspaper after a young couple is viciously murdered.
The Secret Witness: 1 (Shepard & Gray)
Buy The Secret Witness: 1 (Shepard & Gray) by Methos, Victor (ISBN: 9781542038188) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.
Book Review: "The Final Witness"
By Bob Katz. Strangely, Paul Landis makes no acknowledgment of the implications of the evidence he attests to, namely that neither Lee Harvey Oswald nor any other single gunman could have acted alone. The Final Witness: A Kennedy Secret Service Agent Breaks His Silence After 60 Years by Paul Landis. Chicago Review Press, 222 pages, $30.
The Secret Witness by Victor Methos, Paperback
From the bestselling author of A Killer's Wife comes the thrilling first installment in the Shepard & Gray series, featuring a young sheriff who teams up with a former prosecutor to stop a copycat killer. This is Reaper speaking. So begins an anonymous letter published in a Utah newspaper after a young couple is viciously murdered.
The Secret Witness : Methos, Victor: Amazon.ca: Books
From the bestselling author of A Killer's Wife comes the thrilling first installment in the Shepard & Gray series, featuring a young sheriff who teams up with a former prosecutor to stop a copycat killer.. This is Reaper speaking. So begins an anonymous letter published in a Utah newspaper after a young couple is viciously murdered.
The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray, 1)
Buy The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray, 1) Unabridged by Methos, Victor, Pabon, Timothy Andrs (ISBN: 9781713652106) from Amazon's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.
The Secret Agent
The book is at once a thriller, a history of the French left, a survey of academic theories about the prehistoric age, and a philosophical novel about human nature. It is also a dazzling work of fiction: brisk, stylish, funny, moving, and, unexpectedly, piercingly moral.
The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray, 1)
Amazon.com: The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray, 1): 9781713652090: Methos, Victor, Pabon, Timothy Andrés: Books ... This review though is about Secret Witness which is the starting book of a new series featuring Elizabeth Gray... Sheriff Billie Gray and Solomon Shepard, a former prosecutor who seems to understand what goes on inside these ...
Life-size dinosaurs, a candy store tour and more to do this weekend
Take a road tip to Wiscasset for art, food, car racing and a gargantuan amount of candy.
The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray, 1)
The Secret Witness (Shepard & Gray, 1) Audio CD - Unabridged, July 1, 2022 by Victor Methos (Author), Timothy Andrés Pabon (Reader) 4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 31,259 ratings
The Secret Witness: Shepard & Gray, Book 1
The Secret Witness: Shepard & Gray, Book 1 Audible Audiobook - Unabridged . Victor Methos (Author), Timothy Andrés Pabon (Narrator), Brilliance Audio (Publisher) & 4.3 4.3 out of ... This review though is about Secret Witness which is the starting book of a new series featuring Elizabeth Gray... Sheriff Billie Gray and Solomon Shepard, a ...

Book Review: The Secret Witness by Victor Methos

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