My second foray into the world of Bookshots, and one that I enjoyed very much more than the first.
In rural Texas, Molly Rourke's fifteen-year-old son Alex dies of an overdose when he and a friend are experimenting with drugs, and Molly vows vengeance on the operators of the local meth lab, who have been pushing drugs to the schoolkids. She and her two grown-up sons, one with frontline military training, plus a couple of their friends, put into action an elaborate plan that Molly has devised, one that involves a bank heist and much more . . .
I found the tale certainly quite gripping, although for me there were too many characters in Molly's team; perhaps the author felt at least one of the action scenes required five people, but for the rest of the time I kept forgetting that two of them existed. (He himself appears to have lost count on occasion: the five-strong gang at the bank heist is several times referred to as having just four participants.) Another niggle is that, throughout, there's an uncertainty in the use of tenses, as if the text had been initially written in the past tense but then this had been altered to a present-tense narration. (That's a tedious and surprisingly difficult task, as I know only too well -- you always miss a few of the relevant changes on the first go-through!) There's also a plot twist that's thunderingly obvious beforehand and that, when it comes, is delivered with a sort of smugness that made my hackles rise.
These carps aside, I did enjoy this novella, and it was a rattlingly fast read. Good fun, but not one for the ages.