Cold Springs

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series
 
The Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony award-winning Rick Riordan delivers a spellbinding novel of a man on an edge so extreme that his fall will destroy not only him—but all that he holds dear.

Cold Springs

Chadwick’s life was balanced on a knife’s edge—his career, his marriage, his relationship with his dangerously troubled daughter. And then one autumn night, the worst possible thing happened….

Now, a decade later, Chadwick’s heart is on the mend. Working for an old military buddy, he saves kids for a living, escorting troubled teens to a Texas wilderness school that specializes in the toughest brand of love.

Until he gets a phone call that threatens to shatter his new life.

Mallory Zedman is taking the same terrible path Chadwick’s own daughter once took. Defiant and out of control, Mallory is determined to destroy herself and anyone who tries to stop her. No sooner does Chadwick snatch her off the streets than he discovers she is wanted for questioning in a brutal murder—a slaying that seems directly linked to Chadwick’s past.To save Mallory, tough love will not be enough. Chadwick must find the truth behind the murder—and in doing so revisit the infidelities, shattered promises, and violent passions that cracked his world apart. And he must jeopardize the one thing he still has left to lose—a slim hope of redemption.

The Edgar, Shamus, and Anthony award-winning Rick Riordan delivers a spellbinding novel of a man on an edge so extreme that his fall will destroy not only him--but all that he holds dear.

Publishers Weekly

Riordan is a middle-school teacher in San Antonio, which explains why this unorthodox suspense novel-Riordan's first break from his Edgar-, Shamus- and Anthony-winning series about private detective Tres Navarre (The Devil Went Down to Austin, etc.)-centers around two very different kinds of schools. One is Laurel Heights, a private middle school in San Francisco, where a dedicated staff deals with the needs of the privileged children of the affluent. The other is Cold Springs, a survival school in the mountain country of Texas, where a former army Ranger rescues teenagers who have slipped over the edge. Linking the two schools is Chadwick, a huge man who looks like George Washington; he teaches history at Laurel Heights and then becomes an escort at Cold Springs (run by his old Vietnam buddy) when his own teenaged daughter, Katherine, dies of a drug overdose. Chadwick, who blames himself for Katherine's death (he was about to leave his wife for Ann Zedman, the woman who runs Laurel Heights), is a complex and interesting character, and the pressures on him are believable and absorbing-especially when Ann's daughter, Mallory, becomes a Cold Springs candidate. Riordan tilts the playing field by introducing a truly dysfunctional family, the Montroses, and tracing a string of murders related to Katherine's death. Knife-throwing, wild shooting and hairbreadth escapes up the ante, sometimes to the point of overkill, but Riordan is so good at moving his story along-and showing how fragile children's lives can be-that most readers will forgive him his excesses. (May 6) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Rick Riordan is best known for his bestselling YA series Percy Jackson and the Olympians and for a series of award-winning adult mysteries featuring San Antonio P.I. Tres Navarre.