Already Gone
Written by John Rector
Narrated by Malcolm Hillgartner
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
International Thriller Award Nominee
Jake Reese is a writing teacher at an American university. He lives in a small brick Tudor close to campus with his art buyer wife, Diane. His life is quiet—even ordinary. And he likes it that way. But it wasn’t always quiet. In Jake’s distant past was a life on the streets, inflicting damage and suffering on more people than he can count. And now someone from his past, it seems, has come looking for him.
A raw, gripping thriller about the price paid for past sins, John Rector’s third novel is a live wire that crackles with the intensity of a man who has nothing left to lose. When two men attack Jake in a parking lot and cut off his ring finger, he tries to dismiss it as an unlucky case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But when events take a more sinister turn and Diane goes missing, Jake knows he can no longer hide from the truth. As he embarks on a mission to find his wife, he realizes his dark past is refusing to stay buried, and that his future is about to unfold in ways he could never have imagined.
With taut and brooding prose, Rector paints a formidable portrait of a reformed man’s slow descent into a life he thought he had walked away from forever. As the intensity becomes almost unbearable, the pace quickens and the suspense applies an unrelenting, vicelike grip, as Already Gone hurtles toward its ultimate explosive climax.
John Rector
John Rector is the bestselling author of the novels The Cold Kiss, The Grove, Already Gone, Out of the Black, and Ruthless. His short fiction has appeared in numerous magazines and has won several awards, including the International Thriller Award for his novella, Lost Things. He lives in Omaha, Nebraska.
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Broken Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Grove Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ridge Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Lost Things Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Out of the Black Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ruthless Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Already Gone
44 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5John Rector has brought a very strong novel to the table and put it down in front of you. You should be picking up what he is putting down.Before picking up this novel, grab an industrial fan and place it in front of you facing away. When the novelized shit hits it, you will minimize the blow-back you experience.Within five pages of the opening, the ring finger of Jake Reese has been forcibly removed by a pressure instrument that is not intended to be used for surgery. Bolt cutters, normally tasked to leveraging solid metal into separate pieces, had no trouble going through the bone and flesh of Jake’s finger. Jake goes home to his wife, with his wallet intact, and his pride scuffed, and in a terrible amount of confused pain. What the heck just happened, why was it “Nothing personal” as the attacker stated while walking away.Rector’s “Already Gone” just gets better from there. I will not summarize anything further, in fear I could introduce spoilers.What I can advise is that I was kept rabidly interested, a captive audience from cover to cover. Mystery/Thrillers of this kind have a high risk of coming off as heavy handed; they risk a big opening and poor closing; they risk formulaic story lines. This book has surpassed all the risk and achieved all of the reward that a hard hitting story aspires to. It is solid beginning to end.I doubt that this book will become a best seller immediately, heck, there are so many books on the market that it could never achieve this status. I have high hopes though and I believe this is going to be a sleeper hit. Get in on the ground floor and read it early. Ensure that you are one of the cool people on the cutting edge of excellent fiction. After all, reading is a popularity game, right? You want to be cool…Highly suggested!--xpost RawBlurb.com
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a poor mans Linwood Barclay attempt.Starts of quite good but then just gets silly and still has a few unanswered questions.Main character is Jake Reese he gets attacked, his wife goes missing/might be dead there are some dodgy gangsters after him,bent cop, diamonds,trusted friends escape to Mexico.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I stopped reading when I found this book to be too annoying, but then got back to it after finishing another book.A suspense, mystery tale. Jake, a young but reformed criminal, is working at a college teaching creative writing. He is attacked on the street by two men who sever one of his fingers. He has no idea why, but thinks it must be something from his past. Diane, his wife, takes off to Arizona soon after, he thinks she is spooked by what's happened and is going to leave him. But, she does return, only to die in a car crash, which Jake figures must have been set up by the people who attacked him. He tries to figure out what is going on, enlisting the help of a local organized crime figure who is loyal to him, having raised him after his father died. Jake goes to Arizona to see what his wife's state of mind was when she was there, through a psychic whose business card he found among his wife's possessions. He finds unexpected things.The story is fairly well constructed, but I found the character of Jake to be hard to believe. He is supposed to be a hot-head, acting on impulse and without common sense. But, most of the time when he is acting this way, he is too difficult to either like or understand. But, basically, I didn't find him believable.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It was very entertaining, but I had some issues:
1. Predictable. I knew the wife wasn't dead.
2. She lies to Jake the whole time, and he chooses her over the man who raised him. Please. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a page-turning thriller. Jake gets jumped at a local bar, leading to his life spinning more and more out of control. The characters are a rather flat and sometimes the story has a few too many twists, dead ends and unexplained circumstances. That didn't stop me turning page after page.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5His childhood was less than ideal. His father was a criminal, dying in prison. Since one of his early memories is of his mother killing herself, he is left all alone when his father is arrested and, at the age of 12, goes to live with a friend of his father, a man named Gabby. Gabby is a gangster and owns a junkyard where it is said a lot more than just old cars are buried, if you get the idea. It is years later and Jake is living the quiet life he once dreamed of. He is married to Diane, an art buyer and working as a professor of literature at the local college. And then in one evening, his life begins to fall apart. Coming out of a local tavern where he was having a few drinks with some college colleagues, he is attacked by two heavily accented thugs as he goes to his car. They don't rob him, they don't steal his car...no, they cut off one of his fingers with a bolt cutter, his ring finger with his wedding ring still on it. Don't worry, they will send it back, the finger with the ring still on it, to him in a jar.For his part, Jake would just like to forget the whole thing and move on with his life. But when Jake sees the two men who attacked him outside his campus office and then Diane disappears, he knows that can't happen. He will be forced to turn for help to a man he both fears and hates...and trusts more than just about anyone to deal with something like this. His world as he knew it is over and Jake may have to become like the people he ran from years ago, to get his wife back.I have read one of Rector's previous two books, The Grove and enjoyed it a lot, so I was looking forward to his newest. And I was not disappointed!Let me start by saying that I just love the way John Rector writes. You won't find any flowery descriptions here, no rambling introspection. No, his writing is direct and clean, as sharp and spare as the story. This book is action and twists and turns from the that first "snip" to an ending that is fantastic...with just a note of uncertainty to keep us hanging.The only flaw and the only thing that would keep me from giving Already Gone five starts if I gave stars, is that, at times Jake is a bit too naive for his own good. Of course, if he were a bit more cynical, he might not have ever got into the situation that he did. So I will forgive it. This is a rather violent, action filled thriller that will take the reader on a great ride.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5John Rector has brought a very strong novel to the table and put it down in front of you. You should be picking up what he is putting down.Before picking up this novel, grab an industrial fan and place it in front of you facing away. When the novelized shit hits it, you will minimize the blow-back you experience.Within five pages of the opening, the ring finger of Jake Reese has been forcibly removed by a pressure instrument that is not intended to be used for surgery. Bolt cutters, normally tasked to leveraging solid metal into separate pieces, had no trouble going through the bone and flesh of Jake’s finger. Jake goes home to his wife, with his wallet intact, and his pride scuffed, and in a terrible amount of confused pain. What the heck just happened, why was it “Nothing personal” as the attacker stated while walking away.Rector’s “Already Gone” just gets better from there. I will not summarize anything further, in fear I could introduce spoilers.What I can advise is that I was kept rabidly interested, a captive audience from cover to cover. Mystery/Thrillers of this kind have a high risk of coming off as heavy handed; they risk a big opening and poor closing; they risk formulaic story lines. This book has surpassed all the risk and achieved all of the reward that a hard hitting story aspires to. It is solid beginning to end.I doubt that this book will become a best seller immediately, heck, there are so many books on the market that it could never achieve this status. I have high hopes though and I believe this is going to be a sleeper hit. Get in on the ground floor and read it early. Ensure that you are one of the cool people on the cutting edge of excellent fiction. After all, reading is a popularity game, right? You want to be cool…Highly suggested!--xpost RawBlurb.com