Detective Brian Boise is about to embark on the biggest case of his career. After being thrust into law enforcement on the footsteps of his father, Detective Boise finds himself on the trail of a murder suspect he could never have imagined, the mysterious businessman, Trevor Malloy. Trevor is an irresistible hitman with everything going for him, while Detective Boise is a cutthroat detective going against the grain. These two men, both breadwinners and keystones of their families, play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. They are a contrast of each other and as their game progresses, their worlds contort and the line between black and white blurs.

A police detective is handed a case that very little evidence is available for finding a suspect. The reader follows the suspect and how he carries out the murders without leaving a trace of himself behind and the detective who becomes obsessed with tracking down this killer. Both are family men with the suspect's family being a happier unit even though he is away a lot while the detective's family life appears to be rocky because of the hours he spends trying to track down the killer.

A little smudge of gray found at the crime scenes is the only evidence the detective has to work with to solve the crimes. Through a youth basketball league the two families come together since the sons are on the same team. One father is able to attend the games until he is called away and the other seems to never make it to the games on time. Two men headed for a confrontation.

I found Sturak"s book to be extremely interesting and fascinating. It is well written and gives the view of the paths of two men who are bound to meet toward the end of the story. ( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this review, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

For those who don't know, whenever I finish reading a book I plan on reviewing, I actually wait two or three weeks before writing that review, because hindsight and contemplation almost always tends to bring out nuances in my write-up that wouldn't have otherwise existed; but every so often I'll sit down to write that review and realize that I have completely forgotten everything about that book in just those two to three weeks, always a bad sign because it doesn't designate a bad book but merely a bland, generic one. And so it is with Jonathan Sturak's A Smudge of Gray, which I want to reiterate is not terrible at all, a competently written crime thriller about a cop and the criminal he's trying to catch, both of them genial middle-aged fathers whose lives sometimes accidentally intersect in interesting ways (both their sons are in the same basketball league, for example), even while both of them remain oblivious to the fact that the other is the subject of their antagonism. And that's what makes reviews like these so painful, because I hate having to pan novels that aren't actually that bad; but in a world that now sees the release of 50,000 new novels at Amazon every single year, it's becoming of greater and greater importance to an artist now to ask themselves not just whether their own book is well done, but whether it has even a chance of standing out amongst those other 49,999 books it's directly competing against in just that year alone. And the simple fact is that this one doesn't, no more than a random April 1993 episode of Law & Order does when compared to every other episode of Law & Order ever made; and that's a shame, because Sturak is a decent writer and I'd love to see him do something a lot more memorable than this. A middle-of-the-road score for a middle-of-the-road book, it comes with only a limited recommendation, to diehard crime fans who find themselves burning through a book a day and don't mind that many of them are only mediocre.

Out of 10: 7.5 ( )

Excellent and hard to put down thriller about an overworked detective looking for a serial killer. LOVED the ending and can not WAIT for a follow up if written.. Great way to spend a day in the sun. ( )

I got this book as part of LT giveaway.

I fail to understand why the author has to utilize so much foul language. While I am no prude and don't mind some words here or there but excessive foul language only shows how it is a replacement for actual conversations/words.

The plot also seemed a little "convenient" in places. ( )