Editorial Content for Mortal Dilemma: A Matt Royal Mystery

Following CHASING JUSTICE, the ninth book in his Matt Royal series, H. Terrell Griffin introduces Matt’s most complex and perhaps cumbersome endeavor to right wrongs in the island paradise of Longboat Key, adjacent to Sarasota, Florida.

"Loose threads are woven into a tapestry of bloody violence, but, predictably, Matt Royal prevails and stomps a few metaphoric roaches into oblivion."

Divergent plots involving inamorata Detective J. D. Duncan and super-secret government operative Jock Algren have common elements. While on a desolate stretch of Interstate 75 returning from an investigation in Florida’s Panhandle, someone takes a shot at J. D. and forces her car off the road. Soon after in Key West, Jock is shot while on a drinking binge, trying to drown memories of his involvement in the assassination of a mistaken spy decades ago in the Mideast. Is Jock’s flesh wound just a ploy to draw Matt and J. D. away from Longboat Key and onto unfamiliar turf?

The meandering plot involves a host of unsavory characters, including Al Qaeda militants who stick to Jock’s tail like cockleburs. How can this ragtag militia know Jock’s every move? Maybe Jock is “already dead, an empty husk just waiting for the undertaker.” Matt “and Jock are caught in a mortal dilemma. You have to kill the terrorists in order to save yourself and their potential victims.” Although Jock is done with death, Matt realizes “that killing those people would be the moral equivalent of stomping on a couple of roaches.”

The nefarious secondary characters hell-bent to dispatch Jock and J. D. are depicted to have the intellect of those roaches that Matt wants to stomp. There seems to be little satisfaction in outwitting dim-witted wannabe assassins. One has “a scent that transcended body odor. He smelled like three-day-old roadkill.” This is someone intent on carnal knowledge of J. D. just before he plans to kill her?

Loose threads are woven into a tapestry of bloody violence, but, predictably, Matt Royal prevails and stomps a few metaphoric roaches into oblivion. And “It just don’t get no better than this.”