Better Late Than Dead

Rich Larsen has been on the move since he was fifteen, but this time he isn't just drifting-he's running for his life. Framed for the brutal murder of his parents, Rich flees his Ohio hometown with a phantom past, a phony ID, and a mountain of circumstantial evidence pinning the blame squarely on his chest. He doesn't have a plan. He only knows that if the law catches him before he finds the real killer, his story is over.

His aimless flight leads him to Hazzard Island, a self-sufficient winter tomb locked in thick lake ice. Landing a job under an alias as a deckhand on the ferry Island Mae, Rich tries to blend in with the local eccentrics. He finds a grueling, comforting routine navigating the treacherous, frozen slips alongside Cap, an unpredictable pilot with a dark history of his own, and Rusty, an incompetent co-pilot with everything to prove. On the water, Rich finds a brief, quiet solace. On the shore, he finds a puzzle.

When Rich forms an unlikely alliance with an eccentric old mechanic named Enid, they begin digging into a bizarre string of unsolved homicides. The raw data exposes a terrifying reality: someone is methodically executing debut authors, using the exact, grisly methods of death written in their own books. And right in the center of Hazzard Island sits Professor Paxton Turner-an arrogant literary critic whose private writing circle treats murder like a simple exercise in editing.

With Enid suddenly hospitalized and a ticking clock counting down to the next victim, Rich is entirely on his own. He must execute a high-stakes deception trap, white-knuckle his truck camper through a blinding Vermont blizzard, and corner a calculating psychopath before another author is killed. He has to clear his name, save a stranger, and find an antidote to his own self-pity. Because on the icy New England blacktop, Rich is about to find out that it really is better late than dead.