#1 bestselling author James Patterson has teamed up with award-winning sportswriter Mike Lupica numerous times. But in their latest collaboration, THE COUNTRY ROAD MURDERS, Patterson has never leaned into Lupica’s sports knowledge like he does here. The result is a small-town crime thriller with a great underlying professional sports subplot that makes for a truly unique read.

This also happens to be one of the most brutal Patterson novels in recent memory, and it all kicks off with the prologue, which knocked me for a loop. Silas Tucker, a high school principal in Cross Rivers, North Carolina, is a large man and a former football hero. One night, while driving home after enjoying a good meal and music from Levon Helm and The Band, he comes across a motorcycle turned over on State Road 31 ahead of him. He gets out to investigate, but it is a completely unexpected setup as a young man shoots him point blank in the face. It's his first kill. 

"THE COUNTRY ROAD MURDERS is by far the best Patterson/Lupica collaboration yet and one of the most satisfying James Patterson novels I have read in a long time, which is really saying something about the master of the thriller."

The story then jumps ahead 10 years, where we meet Silas Tucker Jr. He is just as big as his father and even more talented athletically. Nicknamed “109,” Silas is an all-American college quarterback with rumors of the NFL becoming stronger each day. He ends up taking his team to the National Championship and being the first-round draft pick of the Pittsburgh Steelers. Silas seems to have it all, until everything ends one night when he is the passenger in a car driven by teammate and fellow NFL draftee Gideon Garland. Gideon will not survive the ensuing crash, and Silas is brought back to life two different times but will never be able to throw a football again.

Silas had to rebound when his father was killed and will have to dig down deep for the fortitude to do it once more. He is working now as a farmhand for a dear friend of his father’s and trying to come to terms with the fact that his life is never going to be what he dreamed it would be. He also is finding out the hard way that he lives in Cross Rivers, voted the third most violent small town in America. It is run by the Southern Mafia in the form of the Crockett family, who very well may have been responsible for his father’s murder and is definitely to blame for the epidemic drug dealing and premature deaths in the county. More recently, a string of missing young women has pointed to the Crocketts being involved in human trafficking. Silas cannot just sit back and do nothing about it.

It’s an uphill battle when the local sheriff is in the family’s pockets. Silas has only one ally: the police officer husband of his best friend Taylor, Burt Webb, who was one of his teammates. He will continue to butt heads with Roof and Lynyrd Crockett, with whom he also played high school football. They have several skirmishes that do not end well for the Crockett boys but always result in some tragic form of retribution, showing Silas just who is really running the show in Cross Rivers.

Every time it seems that Silas and the good residents of Cross Rivers have a small win, they are immediately brought back to reality with extreme violence that often leads to another person on his side being killed. Believe me when I say that no character is safe in this novel. We also get to enjoy a storyline where the Steelers reach out to Silas with a wild idea.

THE COUNTRY ROAD MURDERS is by far the best Patterson/Lupica collaboration yet and one of the most satisfying James Patterson novels I have read in a long time, which is really saying something about the master of the thriller.