Helping the Abbotts

By Steve Weddle

The jacket copy for Jeff Abbott's new book, BLAME, sets the hook.

The crash that killed him…
Two years ago, Jane Norton crashed her car on a lonely road, killing her friend David and leaving her with amnesia. At first, everyone was sympathetic. Then they found Jane’s note: “I wish we were dead together.”
A girl to blame. . .
From that day, the town turned against her. But even now Jane is filled with questions: Why were they on that road? Why was she with David? Did she really want to die?
The secrets she should forget…
Most of all, she must find out who has just written her an anonymous message: “I know what really happened. I know what you don’t remember…”

I recently interviewed Abbott for the Los Angeles Review of Books (posting soon) about BLAME and his 20 other books, including the amazing Sam Capra series.

It's often weird when successful crime fiction folks publish a stand-alone thriller from Money Grab Publisher, but that's clearly not the case here. Everything that Abbott got right in his mystery books, he nails a hundred times over here. The suspense. The characters. Heck, getting the reader to care about the characters. Honestly, at the 90% mark of this book, I could see the killer being one of seven or eight people. Everything in this books is so well set up and, more importantly, moves. What an amazing book. And, reading the book as a writer, I appreciated what a remarkable accomplishment hitting on all cylinders can be.

Then, last week, the Abbotts house was struck by lightning and burned down. The family all got out safe, but the devastation was, well, devastating.

Now would be a good time to check out BLAME, and snag a copy if you want to help out a good guy and get a great book in return. You can think of it like donating to PBS if you want, but instead of giving them $100 and getting a DVD of Arlo Guthrie's poems, you hand $20 to a bookstore and get a copy of BLAME, a book you wanted anyway.

If you'd like to do more, there's a GoFundMe set up by family friends of the Abbotts that's aiming for $20,000. Find out more here.

Either way, read the damn book. It's one of the best books I've read all year. And I read many, many books. Well, the first 40 or 50 pages of many, many books. They're not all this good, you know.

Oh, and be sure to keep an eye open for my LARB interview with Jeff Abbott, posting soon.