A former soldier with PTSD and dying from ALS stumbles upon a bank robbery in progress. With no concern for his own safety, he takes five of the six robbers out with their own guns. Said robbery was planned by the Ukrainian mafia and the boss holds Nate responsible for the objective he interfered with. Now with his teen daughter's life being held over him, he tries to outsmart the mob by taking them down, I don't read action books often these days but I do enjoy them. My first by Hurwitz, I found his writing smooth and pacing fast. I was hooked on the plot and found the characters to be fully fleshed out. Suspension of disbelief is needed as Alex, a former army grunt suddenly has the skills of a SEAL. It's a wild ride with this one-man action novel.

This suspense thriller begins with a man standing on the ledge of a high-rise in Los Angeles. He is there because he plans to kill himself, but while he's out there the bank inside is robbed. Nate Overbay, the man on the ledge has rushed in to save people before, but he is haunted by a time he didn't rush in, and his best friend did, and died for it.
When he looks in and makes a connection with a dying bank employee and realizes more people will die if the men robbing the bank aren't stopped, he looks for a chance and finds one. He stops the robbery, and prevents more deaths, but he becomes known to the man behind the crime, and that is a dangerous place to be.
For he is Pavlo, a powerful Ukrainian gangster, a man the cops would like to catch but haven't been able to pin anything on, and when he finds Nate, he gives him a task and a deadline, and Nate's teenage daughter Cielle's life is in the balance. The men that Pavlo works with are dangerous and violent and Nate is fighting his own body.
Nate's PTSD from his time in the military has estranged him from his wife and daughter, but now he is back in their lives, trying to protect them from the attention he has brought on himself. He doesn't know who he can trust, and he has his own demons to deal with.
But when he discovers the reality behind his task, he wants to find a way to do the right thing and still save his family.
Nate survived childhood loss, losing his best friend, and his family, but this will be the biggest test of survival for him yet. This is an edge of the seat read, hard to put down and with lots of action and violence. It also has moment of love, intimacy, and truth.

I received an ARC of this book from St. Martin’s Press. The story had sounded very intriguing to me.

It starts out with Nate’s attempted suicide. He has been living with the diagnosis of ALS and knew that he would soon become a burden both physically and financially on his wife and daughter. As he prepares to jump off the building, he hears the commotion inside of the bank. He is horrified by what his happening in the bank and soon his military training kicks in and with nothing to lose (since he was there to commit suicide anyway), he takes out the bank robbers. None of that is a surprise since it is in the book’s description.

We then leave the scene of the bank and we learn more of Nate. He and his wife met young and were a love match. They have a daughter and were the perfect family. Then Nate is called to serve in the war and a tragedy in battle sends Nate back home finally but with PTSD and flashbacks. He cannot hold a job and has great difficulty returning to family life. He and his wife eventually split.

When we return to present day and Nate decides he should confess his medical problems to his wife and daughter before he again attempts suicide and not just leave them wondering. We then learn that his wife is now engaged to a former neighbor, who is now living in Nate’s former house with his former wife and his daughter, and that his daughter is now a teenager with the usual teenage-angst aggravated by her feelings of desertion by her father.

At this point is the story, I am thoroughly depress of how Nate has lost his whole world and how his life has turned to crap and want to throw myself off the building.

He is then abducted by the people behind the bank robbery, who show him what they will be do to his daughter if he doesn’t get them what they broke into the bank for. All I can think of is “Oh my God, Who thinks of that!!!!”

Nate is returned to his life, but by this time I am about 100 pages in and have had enough of this story. We don’t know what the bank robbers were attempting to get out of the safety deposit box, just that it was something “he thought he could keep from me.” I don’t know if it will turn out to be a rare treasure or a pet rock, and I just didn’t care.

I found Nate’s life was too depressing, and even if he could save his selfish, bratty kid and win her love and forgiveness, and the same for his wife, he was still dying of ALS and only had months left. I found nothing in this future that would compel me to finish the story when it started getting slow.