If you’re a fan of Brad Parks’ white-knuckle thrillers, mark your calendars because his all-new novel The Last Act is slated to come out next March, and it sounds pretty awesome.
Parks, who published his first book in 2009 (Faces of the Gone), broke out in 2017 with his hit domestic thriller, Say Nothing, a lightning-quick story about a judge whose children are kidnapped and is then blackmailed to get them back. Likewise, his last novel, Closer Than You Know (2018), continues upon the success the author found the year before, and it sure sounds like Parks will keep his foot on the gas pedal with The Last Act.
Struggling stage actor Tommy Jump knows he has to stop chasing applause and start chasing greenbacks. But then he’s offered the role of a lifetime: $150,000 for a six-month acting gig. With a newly pregnant fiancée depending on him, it’s an opportunity he can’t refuse, even though the offer comes from the strangest employer imaginable: the FBI.
The feds won a small victory when they arrested Mitchell Dupree, a banker who has spent the past four years laundering money for New Colima, one of the deadliest cartels in Mexico and a major supplier of crystal meth in the US. But Dupree has documents that could lead to arrests of high-ranking members of New Colima, including their fearsome leader, El Vio . . . if only he’d tell the FBI where they are.
Using a false name and backstory, Tommy will enter Dupree’s low-security prison as a felon and get close to the banker in the hopes that he’ll reveal the documents’ whereabouts. But when Tommy arrives, he quickly realizes that he’s underestimated the enormity of his task and the terrifying reach of the cartel. Because the FBI isn’t the only one looking for the documents, and if Tommy doesn’t play his role to perfection, it just may be his last act.
The Last Act is scheduled to be released on March 12, 2019, and is currently available for pre-order here or anywhere else books are sold.
Praised as “one of today’s finest book reviewers” by New York Times bestselling author Gayle Lynds, Ryan Steck (“The Godfather of the thriller genre” — Ben Coes) has “quickly established himself as the authority on mysteries and thrillers” (Author A.J. Tata). He currently lives in Southwest Michigan with his wife and their six children.