Two Shots (The Second Mack Stedman Story) (ePub)

"Two Shots" is a 93,893 word suspense novel about disenchanted attorney Mack Stedman, who has stumbled into becoming the Sheriff of rural, Grover, Colorado. When his past lover is murdered, along with her mysterious dinner guest, Stedman must take his job more seriously and be the law man he was elected to be. Stedman must deal with his own conflicted emotions about his lover, his ex-wife, and the life he meant to rebuild in Grover while focusing on a man-hunt, a controlling District Attorney, and his own posse, charged with more testosterone than training.

Stedman's aggressive tactics bring a suspect into custody, a man who is certainly a professional mercenary, but Stedman is soon caught in the web of the political ambitions of the local District Attorney, and himself becomes a suspect in the murders after his love letters are found at the crime scene and his own history and a credit card link to the mercenary's rental car place him in the prosecutor's sights. When Mack is told he must get out of the way of the investigation, now led by the State Bureau at the D.A.'s request, he first lapses into self-pity, but then realizes he must do his job, despite the prosecutor's threats. His own investigations leads him to Modesto, California where he discovers that the murders are tied into a terrorist plot that, improbably led to Grover and may not yet be finished. Stedman must choose between the prosecutor's attempt to ruin him, and the search for the truth about the murders. The events in Modesto explode into a confrontation with a Pakistani terrorist cell bent on Jihad, and Mack finds himself in the custody of the F.B.I. extradited back to Grover and on the wrong side of the courtroom.

Represented by an able public defender, the unexpected help of the mercenary, and the common sense of a crafty old county judge who is used to testing the local political winds, Stedman is freed from custody. But Stedman's jail can't hold the shooter either, and it falls to the Sheriff to track down the killer as the fugitive flees deep into the mountainous wilderness that surrounds Grover.

Will Mack be able to capture the mercenary? Will he be able to free himself from the conflicting emotions that led him to break off his relationship with his now murdered lover, or will he continue to find himself plagued by the same demons that drove him to Grover in the first
place?

While Two Shots is contemporary fiction, it is set in a place where rodeo, a theme woven throughout the manuscript, and the last vestiges of the old west, still live on, resisting the outside world as much as it can, but ultimately not immune from the ordinary and extraordinary challenges of our time.