A quick solid thriller, with crooked cops, drug dealers, and an honest cop, trying to make things right. ( )

Sara's doing the best she can. Her life isn't the easiest what with being an officer in the boy's club of a small central Florida Sheriff's office and a single mom to a son with leukemia. Things don't improve when she responds to a call one night for a roadside shooting and find her ex-boyfriend is the cop and he's shot a young man. Everything looks by-the-book, but as Sara looks at things, they don't piece together as well as they should.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, a drug lord worries when a delivery to a new supplier down south goes missing. He asks Morgan, an old school enforcer with issues of his own, to go and find out what happened.

Wallace Stroby is fantastic at creating reprehensible characters who are, if not exactly likeable, then interesting and compelling. Everything's in shades of gray, including the people; what's interesting is how they deal with what they've been dealt. Morgan isn't a good guy, but you can't help but sigh with him over how the business has changed and how his profession doesn't favor the long-lived. Sara's fantastic; tough and committed to doing a good job both as a cop and a mother, but her weakness for the feckless Billy is understandable. He may always make the wrong life choices, but he has a certain charm.

Gone 'Til November is pure modern noir, full of atmosphere, gunshots and run-down bars with gravel lots. ( )

Sara Cross has problems. She is a single mother and her six-year-old son is battling Leukemia. She is one of the best deputies her small Florida town has ever seen. Sara is the first responder to the scene when a shooting occurs and when she shows up, her ex—a fellow deputy—has shot a young, black man and his story is self defense and it seems that the evidence supports his story. Initially, Sara believes Billy’s story, but the more she investigates the more questions she has.
Mikey-Mike is a New Jersey drug dealer who is having issues. His product is getting a name for being weak. He doesn’t trust his hired man, Morgan and his money has come up missing. He sends Morgan to Florida to find the missing money and what happened to the carrier. True to form, not only does Mikey send Morgan, but also a couple of thugs to make sure the job gets done.
Morgan has his own agenda and problems he has to deal with. The other thugs definitely don’t blend in to the quiet Florida community well and Sara is caught right in the middle of it all.
Fast-paced and exciting, this book will keep you entertained the whole way through. Characters so life-like, you will feel intense emotions toward each one of them!

Reviewed by Ashley Wintters for Suspense Magazine ( )

Reading this for a Buddy ReadFinished this tonight and I was not thrilled with it. It was very predictable and the characters seemed whimper to me. Well, not Morgan. He is a bad guy but in my opinion the most interesting of all. Ending left too many loose ends. ( )

Late one night St. Charles County, Florida Deputy Sheriff Sara Cross is dispatched to the scene of a traffic stop gone wrong. Upon her arrival at the deserted rural location where the stop occurred Cross finds Deputy Billy Flynn, a dead suspect, and the suspect’s car trunk stuffed full of illegal weapons.

Flynn indicates that despite it being a routine traffic stop the suspect was acting inordinately nervous so he asked him to open the trunk. Instead the suspect fled, and when commanded to stop turned and pulled a gun on Flynn who shot in self-defense. Sounds believable, and the evidence at the scene backs up Flynn’s story, so Internal Affairs clears Flynn in the shooting.

Sara isn’t entirely convinced, however, and the arrival of the dead man’s widow in town issuing threats of retribution from the people in New Jersey her husband was working for does little to ease Sara’s concerns that there is more to the situation than initially met the eye.

Her suspicions are confirmed when thugs from Jersey show up looking not for what was found in the trunk… but for what wasn’t. Lead by old-timer and career criminal Morgan, the gangsters make their presence known in a very violent manner that quickly turns the small, backwoods town upside down.

Author Wallace Stroby skillfully moves the story forward through alternating looks at the dilemmas facing Sara and Morgan. Sara wants to believe Flynn, with whom she was previously romantically involved, and Stroby does a masterful job portraying the internal conflict Sara wrestles with between her lingering feelings for a man she once loved and her desire to do her job objectively and pursue the truth no matter where it leads her.

Where it leads her, slowly but surely, is into direct conflict with Morgan. Recently diagnosed with cancer and needing serious money to pay for the treatment, Morgan is on his self-declared last assignment. Determined to get to the objective before his fellow gangsters and leverage the job for his own benefit, Morgan is willing to do whatever it takes and go through whoever stands in his way in order to secure his last big score.

Gone ‘Til November is an intense character study that explores the devastating consequences a single poor decision can have, not just on the life of the one who makes it but on the lives of everyone around them. Stroby has taken a relatively straightforward crime story and developed it into a wonderfully nuanced look at the terrible choices people have to make when confronted with situations that challenge their moral compass, especially when the easiest choice would be to do nothing at all.

There’s no dilemma about what choice you should make though. If you enjoy well written crime fiction with realistic, engaging characters you need to get Gone ‘Til November. ( )