Internationally bestselling author Brad Parks is the only writer to take home the Shamus, Nero and Lefty Awards, American crime fiction’s most prestigious prizes. Raising the literary bar is not difficult for Parks, as evidenced by UNTHINKABLE and INTERFERENCE. Unique situations and challenged characters populate the pages. The only things that remain the same are his fingerprints and DNA.

A frigid January morning finds teacher Charles Bliss facing a virtual firing squad of board members at the prestigious Carrington Academy, a boarding school for the ultra-wealthy’s progeny. Accept the school’s severance package or suffer dire consequences. Diane Goodloe, the Connecticut General Assembly senator and a Carrington board member, alleges that Bliss transmitted chlamydia to her daughter Hayley, who is 17.

"Breaching boundaries of the surreal and reality in fiction compels readers to analyze their own reactions given the same circumstances. THE BOUNDARIES WE CROSS is a winner!"

Then Hayley is kidnapped. Overwhelming evidence points a cluster of fingers at Bliss as the perpetrator. Detectives hound him, and his wife, Emily, drains their joint investment account and leaves him. Again.

The police claim that they’ve located Hayley’s body. Losing touch with reality, Bliss ponders confessing. Guilty until proven innocent. But if the body has been found, why did the cops not throw Bliss under the jail? A tiny brain niggle prevents him from caving in. His friend, Leo, often visited with a six-pack or two and provided sound advice. Where is his drinking buddy now that he’s facing the gallows?

After all, LEO is an acronym for law enforcement officer. Was Leo a cop loosening his tongue with booze and gathering evidence when Bliss was two sheets to the wind? After inebriation amnesia, Bliss wakes up, having “passed out in a pool of [his] own urine.” He has no alibi for his whereabouts over the past 12 hours. Complicating matters, “Diane Goodloe was murdered last night.”

Breaking the writer’s rule of no prologue, Parks crafts his creative writer protagonist rationalizing exceptions to established tenets. If there’s a prologue and epilogue, why not a “midlogue”? In this case, 10 of them are interspersed with Hayley’s journal entries. The mélange enhances the flow and works wondrously.

Breaching boundaries of the surreal and reality in fiction compels readers to analyze their own reactions given the same circumstances. THE BOUNDARIES WE CROSS is a winner!