DON’T LOOK TWICE is the third thriller from Andrew Gross — under his name alone, that is. As almost everyone knows by now, he co-authored five titles with James Patterson before launching his own solo career. And this newest work brings back police detective Lt. Ty Hauck, first introduced his previous novel, THE DARK TIDE.
Hauck and his daughter are stocking up on snacks and supplies at a local gas station/mini-market in Connecticut, in preparation for a weekend getaway, when an SUV pulls into the lot and one of the tinted windows slowly opens. His professional instincts kick in and Hauck immediately shouts for everyone to drop to the floor as a gunman in the SUV opens fire.
After the vehicle speeds away, Hauck checks to see if anyone was hurt. His daughter is unharmed, as is the station owner at the checkout stand, but a man standing behind Hauck was fatally shot. Hauck begins an investigation of the scene and gathers evidence and clues. The shooter was wearing a red bandana — the colors of a local Latino gang — and witnesses heard him shouting something in Spanish as the SUV pulled away. It begins to look like a retribution shooting intended for the station owner, and the dead man was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But then Hauck learns that the dead man is actually a federal prosecutor. Suddenly, the case takes on an entirely different character, and Hauck and his team of police investigators follow leads that reveal a possible gambling scam involving the prosecutor and a huge, upstate casino run by American Indians. But then people associated with the case begin to die. And the deeper Hauck looks, the more complex and dangerous the case becomes.
To his credit, Gross enhances what might have simply been a simple police procedural story with deft characterizations. This is especially true of Hauck, who starts out as a likable enough single father and police detective, and over the course of the novel becomes almost fanatical in his drive to find the truth about the killings. The action and plot elements move along at full-tilt in mostly brief chapters of four to six pages.
But perhaps in his desire to make the story something deeper and more significant, Gross bit off a whole lot more than we readers can chew. The last third of the book seems to take forever to unveil the key players and motivation behind the drive-by shooting and the other deaths in the story. Hauck’s tenacity pulls us along for the most part, but even this begins to wear thin as more red herrings and diversions are revealed until the very last pages.
But you’ll no doubt find your way to those last pages, because Gross is a skilled thriller author, and DON’T LOOK TWICE scores high on suspense and entertainment rankings. And if nothing else, it proves that there is indeed life after Patterson. —Alan Cranis
