A kickass female lead character that you don't want to meet in a dark alley because you will lose 6 love!

"For Weldonville there were two times: the time before and the time after"

July 19 was the day Weldonville; a small town in Colorado; died. A well orchestrated escape by 12 inmates from Weldonville Fereral Penitentiary released thousands of inmates who poured into the town and raped and killed whomever got in there way and others just for the fun of it. 97 innocent people lost their lives.

It is now 2 years on and the 12 are still missing. Lieutenant Leah Hawkins is taking a 1 year sabbatical. Her main goal is to find these men and wipe them off the face of the earth. She meticulously researched the men and know there weaknesses.
Her motto - "surprises and advantages were temporary, like ice cream. They had to be enjoyed quickly or they melt away"

Will she be able to catch them or will they catch on to what is happening.

I loved the first 60% of the book and then it lost me a bit. Some events and scenes seemed unnecessary in the end and it felt like I was reading a different book. The beginning was really good and kept we on the edge of my seat so I feel really let down by the last bit. I liked the factual style of writing in the beginning but that also changed for me in the latter part of the book. A difficult one to rate.

Thank you to #netgalley and #groveatlantic for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

Weldonville, Colorado is a very small town. Most citizens are employed by the federal penitentiary outside the town, originally designed to hold white collar criminals. Over the course of a few years, some very bad men have plotted to get themselves transferred to Weldonville. Twelve men lead a prison break and the rampage that follows destroys the town. Two years later, Leah Hawkins takes a leave of absence from the Weldonville police. She is going on her own rampage, to find and destroy the 12 men who were responsible for the prison break. Quite an interesting plot device, my major complaint is that Leah's character is never fully developed. She lost a loved one that night, but it seems superficial (to me). Perry is always an engaging writer, but this was not one of his best.

Howdy, howdy! Merry Christmas to all who celebrate and happy holidays to those who celebrate something else! I hope everyone has a pleasant day full of love and good food. Dad’s making a lasagna for us. It’s okay. You can be jealous. Anyway, it’s the last Wednesday of the month, so that means it’s book review time. When I requested this month’s book, I thought it was a mystery based on the description, but I really don’t know what category it falls into. It’s called A Small Town by Thomas Perry. It was released on December 17th by The Mysterious Press (an imprint of Grove Atlantic). As usual, I must thank the publisher and NetGalley for giving me access to an ARC in exchange for an honest and unbiased review. Let’s get to it.

A Small Town follows a bunch of people, but primarily Leah Hawkins, in the aftermath of a prison break. It’s been two years and the twelve who orchestrated it have yet to be caught. The current police chief of the dying town decides to take a sabbatical to hunt the twelve down herself. Can she succeed where everyone else has failed?

I’m going to say it right up front: I hated this book with a passion. So, if you don’t want to read one long rant, feel free to skip to the rating. For everyone else, my dislike started with the basic premise. A small town cop with the exact same leads as the FBI is the only one who can find these men who aren’t even that hard to find. The first one was living with his mother. I’m sure the FBI had no idea about that and had no one watching the place at least in the beginning. It’d be too easy. Turns out it was that easy, but only Leah could figure it out. From there, she got a bunch of lucky leads. It was annoying. And I won’t even go into the psychology of the escapees and how some with non-violent histories are suddenly committing rape and murder to “kill the town” and make their escape easier.

Then there were the subplots. Leah’s romance was ridiculous. She was the other woman to some city official but it was okay because his wife had just been diagnosed with Muscular Dystrophy (as if that’s not an umbrella term for multiple possible diagnoses), so her sex life was over and she was a benevolent being who allowed the affair. First off, stop perpetuating the idea that cripples aren’t sexual beings. Second, do your damn research. One quick Google search will tell you that MD is a number of different diseases. Pick one. Lastly, his wife may have been a forgiving person, but don’t use a disability to rationalize shitty behavior. It’s not okay. And the romance did nothing to further the main plot anyway, so it was completely unnecessary.

There was also that whole cheating thing with the racist woman and the criminal. The sex scenes were completely random and felt like they were thrown in last minute to set up the deaths of two of the escaped prisoners so that Leah wouldn’t have to hunt them down. It just felt like lazy storytelling. But I was already firmly against this book by that point, so maybe I’m wrong. I doubt it, but maybe.

The writing was subpar at best. I understand adding description to flesh stuff out and up the tension, but I know how to open a door. Going through it step by step is just tedious. And that’s how a lot of this book felt. Tedious. And then there was the POV. It was one of those books that was in everyone’s head and jumped around multiple times each chapter, which is fine. The bad part was that there are so many names thrown around and characters that only show up once that it’s impossible to follow without some kind of chart. I don’t understand why half of the people were even worth getting names let alone a peek inside their head. There was no focus.

Ultimately, I wanted to stop reading A Small Town. I would have if I hadn’t been reviewing it. But I figured I needed to see if it got any better. It didn’t.

Overall, I gave it 1 out of 5 stars because NetGalley and everything requires some kind of star rating. It’s really more like half a star because I acknowledge that some people enjoyed it. Pick it up if it’s your thing. It wasn’t mine.

Intense and scary, meticulous in detail this book gives a new perspective to prisons in the community and to the idea of revenge. On July 19 twelve prisoners escaped from a maximum security prison near a small town in Colorado. They let loose over 1000 inmates who murdered, raped and destroyed the town. 2 years later the original twelve still haven't been captured. Lt. Leah Hawkins of the town's police department begins to search for them so that she can kill them and exact revenge for the destruction of her town and the murder of so many people. Thomas Perry gives us fascinating details relating to Leah's hunt for these men.
Thank you Netgalley for the opportunity to read an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Elevator pitch:

Con Air/Kill Bill

Read/Skip:

READ

Revenge stories always provide the hero with a justification to commit evil acts without having to think too long about morality. These stories are gratifying and unsatisfying at the same time. A lot of revenge stories are aloof, improbable, comforting and a bit disorienting. A Small Town is no different.
Perry's style and plotting are unique and very adapt to a revenge tale; it is extremely to the point. Something that is rarely the case in thrillers, where behind every clue, you often find a hidden world packed of shocks and deceit. A Small Town meanders all over the USA, but the primary story line takes the fast lane right to Hell.
Leah Hawkins, the protagonist, has one goal, bring to justice the twelve men that devastated her town. And that is what she does without much dilly-dallying. A love interest backstory is provided, but we never delve too deep into Leah's personality, her weaknesses, or how she became this killing machine. As I said before, this is also quite common in a revenge plot. Sometimes it feels as if something is lacking; other times, it is damn comforting.
I liked the relentlessness of this story.
It sets off a genuinely horrific prison break, where hundreds of inmates from a Supermax prison descend on a town and murder and rape its inhabitants. In the first chapters, Perry puts his focus on the victims, and as always, when you identify with the bearer of the POV, you want this person to survive, but one by one, the people we root for are eliminated from the story.
Thomas Perry constructs an unrelenting world. And this brutal universe works both ways. Not only is there no break for the innocent. The guilty encounter the same barbaric fate. It is almost amusing. We see the criminal in his habitat, figuring out how he can avoid the reckoning that is coming his way. No dice. It makes their stories, the lead-up to justice, pointless. And you can decide if that works for you. If it is irrelevant because that is precisely what these awful men deserve? Or if reading about it is a waste of time. Sure, it creates a distance, you soon figure out the rules of this story, and it makes it hard to care, or feel tension when nothing a person will do will make any difference. But, again, it is rather entertaining.
Up to the end, this way of telling a story worked with me. But in the last part, the completion, Perry veers off in a longer interlude, with characters that are only peripherally involved in the main plot. Like Perry had this last part lying around in his drawer, and decided to use it in this book. But luckily, the story is almost done and told so convincingly that you take it for granted.
I could have used a little more tension, a more fallible protagonist, but ultimately is a satisfying and bold action thriller.

The Gist:

Twelve prisoners escape from prison. To create confusion, they liberate the rest of the prison population. All these criminals assault the small town in Colorado that hosts the supermax prison, Weldonville. They kill and raper numerous people. Two years later, most are caught, but not the twelve responsible. So the mayor appoints Leah Hawkins to a secret mission. With unlimited funds, she has to bring the 12 to justice. Leah has to kill them one by one.

Fantastic plot and a well written story with great characters. There is action throughout the book, and all of it is no-nonsense.

Note to self - never, ever live near a prison! Yikes, this was a horrific book. But as usual, Perry creates great characters and a huge amount of suspense. Yes, I had to suspend my disbelief in a couple of places, but that is usually true with most thrillers. I have enjoyed all of Perry's books and this was no exception. Publisher - please do not sell this book to prison libraries!

Who would I recommend this book to?

As I made my way through the story, I thought of one friend after another whom I thought would enjoy it. Then the flaws that other reviewers have mentioned would intrude: Although it's a very well-written story, it isn't actually very plausible, which would rule out a lot of candidates.

The premise is fresh and original: a fiendishly well-planned prison break in Colorado floods the neighboring small town with violent criminals, who wipe out many residents, businesses and homes. Two years later, the tiny municipality has yet to recover, and the female police chief is sent after the 12 perpetrators of the disaster, on a clandestine search-and-destroy mission to avenge the community's losses.

The writing, which is clean and crisp, carries the readers along on Leah Hawkins' odyssey without raising too many questions about the believability factor (after all, we've already gone along with the impossible timing and evil serendipity of the prison break itself. Is it less likely that a single cop, without the support of a multi-agency network, can accomplish what the alphabet soup of federal department failed to do?)

As I say, I made it past those obstacles to the very end of the book. But that epilogue. It belonged in a different book -- perhaps a different world. It was a romance novel wrap-up to an unsentimental, hard-core crime story.

And that settled it. I know of no other readers who could swallow this particular dissonant stew. Three stars for the things the author got right.

Thanks to NetGalley for and advance readers copy.

A Small Town by Thomas Perry is well written and captivating. The small town of Weldonville was the site of a federal prison. Initially a limited security prison for white collar criminals and the like, Weldonville had recently been made into high security facility by the Bureau of Prisons.
One day a group of prisoners take over the prison killing all the employees. After taking the weapons from the guards and changing into their clothes, many inmates then rampage through the town killing the spouses of the guards after raping some. Children were not spared.
Police Lieutenant Leah Hawkins, formerly of the Colorado Bureau of investigations had been part of the attempt to stop those who wanted to decimate the town. In the end only the twelve who pulled of the takeover escaped in vehicles. The rest were stopped and put back into jail.
Some years later Leah is recruited by certain town elders to track down the twelve who were never caught.
A well thought out novel that is as well written as any of Thomas Perry’s previous works. I recommend it highly.

Probably best described as revenge porn, this is the tale of Leah Hawkins (never just Leah, always Leah Hawkins) who is hired to hunt down and kill 12 men who unleashed hell on a small town in Colorado when they no only escaped their prison, but also set all the other inmates free. This requires some suspension of logic- that the prison break would happen, that the inmates when released would go on such a horrible horrible rampage, that the 12 could not be tracked down by official law enforcement but could be by one cop, that a town would hire her to kill them and so on. I did like Leah Hawkins. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. Completely implausible and very violent, this is also very readable.

Audacity is the keyword here. The audacity of twelve psychopaths planning a mass escape from a low security federal prison turned max security prison. The audacity of the twelve planners to punish the small town that “hosted” the prison; to grind that small town into the ground. Then there is the audacity of that small town’s city government to send their own punishment against the twelve psychopaths who escaped. Finally, the escapees are enraged at the audacity of Weldonville to paint a target on their back and decide to fight back.
The small town of Weldonville, Co sends police Lieutenant Leah Hawkins to paint that target on each of the twelve co-conspirators and then take aim. In the small bit of humor present in this book, the town officials who are aware of Leah’s mission use the large federal grants to finance Leah’s mission of retribution and revenge.
Part of Leah does not want these men to die easy, for she has fought the escaped prisoners in the streets, losing friends and loved ones in the battles. Killing the remaining escapees will be easy, for the death toll at the prison and in the town is a heavy burden for Leah.
If you are a fan of Perry’s early works, the not-to-be-missed Jane Whitfield books, then you will know what I mean when I say this is a book in reverse of that terrific series. Instead of helping a person hide completely, this is discovering several people who think they have hidden completely.
Exciting and unusual, A Small Town fascinates with a carefully detailed description of how the bad guys planned both their break out and their own escape; and then how Leah tracks them down.
Perry’s writing is crisp as always, giving just enough information. Thankfully he did not overwhelm with details of the rapes and murders that just about killed Weldonville. When he did give detail it is spread throughout the book in small doses, not too graphic.
Although I liked the content of the epilogue, I didn’t think it connected with anything I had read earlier. It really came out of the blue. This was the only fault I found with the book.
Some of the other reviewers found A Small Town to be implausible. I found the story to be an imaginative fictional thriller. I find most thrillers to be implausible.
Thanks to NetGalley for providing me an ARC in exchange for a fair and balanced review.

I received an ARC of A Small Town. The book was described as a thriller, which I guess it technically was, just not the type of thriller I was expecting. I am a gullible person when reading thrillers, but even I found many parts of this book a little hard to believe. The premise of the book is there is a prison outbreak where the prisoners invade the town and destroy it. Probably anyone who has ever had a prison built near their town probably believes that something like this could happen. The escapees hung around the prison area a little too long to make it believable. Then, after two years, a single person is sent out to hunt down and kill the 12 main planners of the prison break. Once again, this seemed a little to easy, as more than one of the prisoners were residing in their hometown. It's not a bad read, the book goes really fast and doesn't require a lot of thinking or concentration. Although I've never read any other books by this particular author, I'm guessing this was not his best effort.

WOW! A great book from start to finish. Thomas Perry starts the story with a unthinkable crime committed against a whole community. When law enforcement fails to capture and punish the 12 people responsible for this crime, one lone arrow is pointed at the criminals with no limits set on their punishment, just make sure they pay. While readers must suspend their critiques in several chapters, the story moves quickly as our heroine finds her quarry and leaves no witnesses behind. A great thriller you'll be sorry to finish.

OK, I am familiar with Mr. Perry’s work. I have read all of the Jane Whitefield novels as well as the Butcher Boy series, and I can recommend them wholeheartedly. And I understand that Mr. Perry’s characters are often on the wrong side of the law – that’s part of what makes them so interesting.

But this novel is a bit too much for me. The premise and set-up are well-done: a mass escape from prison meticulously planned, a murderous rampage through a small town, the 12 ringleaders disappearing in the chaos.

Jump ahead to two years later. The town has never recovered from that fateful night. So the town leaders basically give their police officer Leah Hawkins a sabbatical to find and murder the ringleaders, thinking that this will bring closure to the town. That’s the first of many head-scratching suspensions of disbelief the reader is asked to make.

Leah is a strong character, but it’s hard to believe that she can track down the fugitives where the manpower and resources of the FBI have failed. And her clues to get them seem pretty obvious – it says something about the author’s perception of the intelligence of the FBI that Leah out-thinks them with this limited material. And once she finds them? She kills them and gets away.

Mr. Perry continues to attempt to work on our sympathies, trying to portray the 12 fugitives as still being bad men, and deserving to die, but it still seems like cold blooded murder to me. The fugitives are cardboard bad guys, no depth or complexity to their characters. And the ending is both rushed and anti-climactic, like much of the book. After another fast-forward, we get our “happily ever after” ending.

Overall, a poor effort from Mr. Perry. I look forward to him returning to form in his next outing.

I requested and received an advanced copy from Netgalley and Mysterious Press in exchange for my honest review. Thank you!

A good mystery/ thriller when yet another strong women seeks justice for atrocities that occurred in her town twelve years ago. Thomas Perry is one of my favorite mystery writers.

Review by Fantastic Fiction:

In A Small Town, twelve conspirators meticulously plan to throw open all the gates to the prison that contains them, so that more than a thousand convicts may escape and pour into the nearby small town. The newly freed prisoners rape, murder, and destroy the town - burning down homes and businesses. An immense search ensues, but the twelve who plotted it all get away.

After two years, all efforts by the local and federal police agencies have been in vain. The mayor and city attorney meet, and Leah Hawkins, a six-foot, two-inch former star basketball player and resident good cop, is placed on sabbatical so that she can tour the country learning advanced police procedures. The sabbatical is merely a ruse, however, as her real job is to track the infamous twelve. And kill them.

Leah's mission takes her across the country, from Florida to New York, from California to an anti-government settlement deep in the Ozarks. Soon, the surviving fugitives realize what she is up to, and a race to kill or be killed ensues. Full of exhilarating twists and surprisingly resonant, A Small Town will sweep readers along on Leah's quest for vengeance.

I loved A Small Town by Thomas Perry! The main character, Leah Hawkins, was one bad ass cop and woman. The suspense as she hunts down the criminals responsible for the prison break in Weldonville, CO and subsequent murders, rapes, etc. of most of the town was almost unbearable. I could see this being a movie or TV series. I hope to see more of Leah! Thanks to Net Galley and the publisher for the ARC of this book, all opinioins are my own.

How great it is to begin a new book and have it grab your attention right from the start! I read a lot, and there have been too few of those, recently. Before getting it, I read a few reviews, and those who described the heroine as a female Jack Reacher weren't far from the mark! Wow, what a gal! I'm wondering if she's featured in other books; I need to check out Thomas Perry.

After a local prison break (great story, btw) in which a whole town is pretty much psychologically as well as physically destroyed, Leah Hawkins takes it upon herself to hunt down the 12 former prisoners who instigated it.

I have to offer kudos to the author, as he is so well-informed in a lot of aspects, including electronics.

In a small town in Colorado, the main “industry” is the prison. One horrific night there is a prison riot perpetrated by a core of twelve hardened criminals. In the course of the riot, hundreds of prisoners escape into the small town. They are on a rampage of killing, rape and stealing. Many of them are recaptured but the hardcore group remains at large.

The small town will never be the same. Almost every family lost a family member or friend. Many homes were burned down to hide the evidence and carnage. There can be no going back and even rebuilding will never make the community whole again.

Two years into this destruction, Leah Hawkins, a former law officer and town resident, returns to go on a mission. Supposedly she is going to study advance law enforcement methods to make sure this type of criminality never occurs again. In reality she is on a hunt to track down the remaining conspirators and dole out lethal justice.

Thomas Perry tracks Leah as she goes after each perpetrator by carefully using police procedural techniques. Her methods are not by the book, nor is the ending that she seeks for each criminal. At some point the hunter becomes the hunted, so Leah must be on guard, too.

I had expected this story to be more engrossing and exciting. The narrative’s focus on procedure is so detailed, that the emotional impact of the story waivered. There was also a disconnect with the personality of Leah Hawkins. Her single-mindedness is commendable but does not allow the reader to embrace a fully realized character.
This is a dark, violent but not particularly compelling book in spite of being well written.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.

I'm a big fan of Thomas Perry's early work, Butcher's Boy and the Jane Whitfield books. I was excited to read the ARC of "A Small Town". This is a very different kind of book. The small town of Weldonville was home to what was supposed to be a prison for white-collar and nonviolent offenders. Thanks to overcrowding in other prisons, Weldonville Federal Penitentiary soon becomes the place where the worst of the violent criminals were sent to serve their sentence. The story very quickly turns to a flawlessly planned prison break that wipes out the population of Weldonville. Most of the inmates were killed or recovered but the twelve most violent were not found. Enter Officer Leah Hawkins, former high school basketball star, who is on sabatical to tour the nation and learn about the most current law enforcement techniques. That's the "official" story, unofficially Leah is tracking down and disposing of the twelve escapees. Eventually the former inmates catch on and the hunter becomes the hunted.

Perry writes this book as a police procedural - each take down is described in detail and I learned so much about tracking people that I feel like I could go into the PI business myself. There was little humor, romance, or anything else to distract from the deadly job at hand. Fans of true crime and crime fiction will enjoy this book but it is very violent and descriptive making it suitable for adults only.

Perry channels Frederick Forsyth

This is the third Thomas Perry novel I've read and while the story is, on the surface, interesting, I find books written in this style uninteresting. I'm old enough to have read a lot of Frederick Forsyth and this book, and to a lesser extent Mr. Perry's previous book "The Burglar" are reminiscent of Mr. Forsyth's way of writing that is one pounding factual sentence after another style driving straight through the narrative punctuated by minimal dialog or description. "The Old Man", the first of Mr. Perry's books I read, did not strike me this way.

"The Old Man"
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3W131UVEHH6DT/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0802127533

"The Burglar":
https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1S7DFVRFF9LMM/ref=cm_cr_getr_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B07LGDZ8JY