I love David Rosenfelt's books. They are easy to read, there are no complicated plot twists that you have to stop and figure out, his characters are always very appealing, and his stories always entertain. I pretty much read this in one sitting. 4 1/2 stars definitely.
Doug Brock seemingly has a great life. A police officer, he has a partner, Nate, who is also his best friend, he's engaged to be married to a wonderful woman, Jessie, who is also a cop, and he's in the process of adopting a teenage boy, Johnny, whom he's mentored and helped turn his life around. Then everything changes in the blink of an eye when his soon-to-be son is killed in a drive by shooting. Doug is convinced it was perpetrated by Nicholas Bennett, a man Doug and Nate have been investigating. He becomes obsessed with taking the guy down. He ends up breaking his engagement, comes close to alienating his partner, and has most of the police force convinced he's gone off the deep end.
One day, Nate gets a call from him. Doug is babbling almost incoherently about how he's got enough to put "him" away - the "him" surely meaning Bennett. While trying to convince Doug that he's gone overboard in his thinking, Nate hears gunshots and the line goes dead. Before he can discover his partner's whereabouts, he gets a call from Jessie saying Doug has been shot. Nate rushes to the hospital to find Doug's wounds aren't serious but he sustained a traumatic brain injury from falling off a second story balcony and is in surgery. To make a long story short, when Doug wakes up he can't remember anything from before his phone call to Nate, has in fact, lost ten years of his life.
Thus begins the main storyline of the book. Once sufficiently recovered, Doug begins to piece together what he was doing prior to being attacked. If what Nate told him was true then he'd obviously found a way to prove Bennett's evil doings. He just needs to recall whatever it was he'd uncovered. Then Nate is shot while he and Doug are attempting to stop a terrorist bombing at a theatre. Turns out, the terrorist had ties to Bennett. As Nate recovers, Doug enlists Jessie's aid in his quest for justice. This gives Doug some time to mend some fences with Jessie. For the life of him, he can't figure out why he would have let her go. It was made painfully clear to him by both Nate and Jessie that he'd hurt her but she refuses to talk about it. And neither Nate nor Jessie have told him about Johnny's death and what motivated Doug to go after Bennett in the first place.
I really enjoyed the way the author brought Doug and Jessie back together. It was during the course of their investigation that they had to spend time together which gave Doug the opportunity to get to know Jessie all over again. In this way, we get some idea of who these characters really are and what their past relationship had been like. I also liked Doug's interaction not only with his partner, but with his captain as well. Given Doug's amnesia, he can't remember the man and it makes for a few comical moments in the book.
In addition, Doug's investigation leads him to a terrorist plot of massive proportions so then they are racing against time to try and foil it before it happens. I'm not giving anything away here because we learn early in the book there is more going on than Doug's quest for vengeance. All in all, this was a very enjoyable read. If you've never read this particular author before, I suggest you give him a try. He also has the Andy Carpenter series in case you enjoy legal thrillers and have a love for dogs!