Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

This is a good solid read, well written and fast paced. I will definitely read more by Mr Ryder in future. The book doesn't compare to Lee Child (not many authors do), but it is well worth the time and effort.

A fabulous book which I could not put down. Really easy to read, gripping and wonderfully told story that I would recommend to others!!

Ex-military Grant Fletcher receives a call from an old friend. His 20-something daughter has disappeared. It’s the kind of case that ex-military loner Grant Fletcher would normally be happy to take on—he will always seek justice if someone has the money to pay him. But this one he’s doing for free. This one’s personal.

Fletcher owes his life to Lila’s father. And Fletcher knows that returning Lila safe and sound is the only thing that matters to his wheelchair-bound friend.

The only clue Fletcher has is that she last talked to her father from a small town in Georgia.

What he finds there is baffling. Lila is not the first woman to go missing from there ...and probably won't be the last.

He also discovers that he's not the only one looking for these missing women .. .the FBI is interested in finding them .. and in placing Fletcher at the top of the persons of interest list.

This is a compelling well-written action-packed novel. I enjoy small town crimes .. the characters are either quirky and friendly.. or just downright evil. This small town has dark secrets and there are those who will do anything at all to keep secrets in the shadows. I like Fletcher's character, the FBI agent not so much. I think it's mostly that she isn't yet fully formed. There are a few twists and turns leading to an unexpected conclusion.

Many thanks to the author / Bookouture / Netgalley for the digital copy of this crime fiction. Read and reviewed voluntarily, opinions expressed here are unbiased and entirely my own.

There are few writers who can build characters that you immediately feel connected to. John Ryder has done this with Grant Fletcher. Grant, and his FBI investigator partner, Zoey, are so deftly written that you "see" them as they search for any clues to the abduction of young women in a small, backroads Georgia town. I could no more have set this book down before finishing it than you could get up and leave a movie in the middle. The action, tension and twists kept the story moving quickly. No down time for Grant Fletcher. First shot is a definite winner of a series starter.

Wow what a great read. A action packed story that has you turning the pages, or thumbing your kindle very quickly!

A couple decide to go on a road trip and get more than they bargain for when Lila disappears, she leaves a diner and within minutes she is gone. Her partner is met with silence, no-one knows or wants to help.

Luckily for the partner and unluckily for the town, Grant Fletcher decides to investigate. Lila is related to someone he would do anything for. Grant hits the town and finds out that Lila isn’t the only woman to have disappeared. So where do all the women go?

This is great introduction to Grant Fletcher as we see he flex his muscles but also his brains as he outwits the town residents.

Enjoyable read with a nod to Jack Reacher adventures. An ex Royal Marine, Grant Fletcher is helping out a friend he owes his life to, you don't get a stronger bond than that.

Small town intrigue, corrupt officials and questionable characters help the story to flow. I liked Fletcher as a protagonist - strong and resourceful he doesn't know when to stop fighting. Helped along the way by Special Agent Zoey Quadrado the two head to a small town called Daversville to solve the disappearance of missing women.

Excellent ending to the book, no doubt there will be a second in this new series, it will allow this newly formed partnership to test the boundaries and solve the problems others don't want to deal with. Look forward to the second in the series for sure.

First Shot by John Ryder
A Grant Fletcher Thriller #1

We meet the girl, briefly.
We meet the girl’s beau
We know she is taken
We know he is not

And then

We meet the man sent to rescue her
He is there as a favor to her father
To rescue her if he can
Will he?

Intense, intricate, and intriguing this story tells of abductions leading to disappearances that are taking place in small town Georgia. People don’t comment, the law doesn’t follow-up, and there is something definitely rotten in Daversville, Georgia.

What I liked:
* Grant Fletcher: a man with principles willing to do what was required to find Lila and return her to her father. I also liked that he loved his wife and loves his daughter
* Special Agent Zoey Quadrado: focused career FBI agent with a backstory that indicates why this case is so important to her
* The pace, plotting and writing
* The action scenes
* Trench – could see him in a book of his own
* The fact that there will be another book in this series to look forward to

What I didn’t like:
* The twisted abductors
* Knowing that there are people out there as evil as the twisted abductors

Did I like this book? Yes
Would I read more in this series? Yes
What I would like more of: Fletcher’s relationship with his daughter and who takes care of her while he is away

Thank you to NetGalley and Bookouture for the ARC – This is my honest review.

4.5 Stars

Favorite Quotes:

Tall Boy eyed him as if he was a circus freak from bygone days. ‘You’s talkin’ with the tongue outta your shoe… C’mon, let’s get outta here ’fore we catch arthritis from this old coot.’

Daversville was a town that time hadn’t ever known about, let alone forgot. The clothes worn by the townspeople weren’t so much outdated fashion as never having been fashionable. Each item was clean and well presented, but they were clearly worn as an alternative to nudity rather than make the wearer feel or look good.

Fellers wasn’t a bar for tourists, it was a spit and sawdust kind of place with genuine sawdust and extra spit.

With the pace of an arthritic sloth, Fletcher took a few gentle steps forward.

My Review:

I rarely read books of this genre but I would routinely add them to my routine if I could find a bevy of them as easy to fall into and difficult to let go of as First Shot proved to be. Mr. Ryder’s engaging writing was taut with tension, surprisingly emotive, and well packaged with glints of humor and refreshingly clear descriptive details where each perfectly honed word packed a powerful punch while also being smartly strung together in clever arrangements that pulled sharp visuals and defined step-by-step planning and eventful fight scenes that ran like a movie reel behind my eyes. I definitely wanted to give the caustic and surly FBI agent an attitude adjusting whack to the back of her head, although the bad guys eventually did that for me.

I was already duly impressed before I noticed First Shot was the only book listed for this author – could it actually be his first?!? I have just made a new addition to my list of authors to watch for as I now have a taste for an action hero named Grant Fletcher.

A hero who doesn’t want to be one, a man with a dark past who has a moral sense of right and wrong thrown into a situation he did not expect. Asked to search for a friends daughter should be routine unfortunately for Fletcher the town he visits has a secret so dark they want no one too ever discover it. High octane thriller with a strong male lead aided by an equally compelling female lead the book sets the groundwork for a new series of books that will given the writers talents get better and better.

Short review: Blech. Don't bother

Longer review: The book wasn't offensive, much, but it was poorly written and offered nothing new.

First, I read an ARC. Or, more accurately, a rough draft. There weren't just typos and the occasional wrong punctuation. Oh no. We had run-on sentences, sentence fragments, sentences that were stilted, awkwardly written, or just flat out made no sense. Add in the many wrong words, missing words, comma orgies, etc, and at times, I needed a translator to make sense of what I was reading. Hopefully, all of that was cleaned up for a final copy. But really, it was not in good enough shape to be sent out for review. It needed cleaning up first.

Okay, onto the story. A small town in rural Georgia has a pattern of female tourists going missing. Local police make a token attempt at finding them and locals often deny the women were ever there. Grant Fletcher, he of a tortured, sad past (yes, I'm being sarcastic) comes to town and tries to find the missing daughter of a friend. The town is weirdly anachronistic and we never get a satisfactory explanation. There is an explanation provided; I just didn't buy it. And ultimately, that was a problem. There was just so much I couldn't buy into. The story didn't just stretch credulity; it exploded it.

Fletcher is ye basic action hero; he brings nothing new to the table. I already mentioned the requisite tortured past. He's also superman, taking down 4 opponents at once; he has mad skills; thinks fast on his feet; he broods; blah blah blah. The lack of originality would be bearable if the characterization shone or the writing shone or the action was awesome; it needed something, anything, to stand out.

The pacing is awkward, there's way too much internal monolog, the villains are over the top and lack characterization, and I just didn't find their motives credible. Even less credible was the hold they had on the town and how ass-backwards it was. That just never worked. That mystery was more appealing to me than the missing women because the solution to that was obvious. Sadly, I was right.

I also was less than impressed with the other lead, Zoey Quadrado. She's a young and relatively inexperienced FBI agent sent to investigate the missing women. The authorities have noticed a pattern and that the local police are incapable of solving the disappearances. She initially comes off as competent. Then as soon as she encounters Fletcher, her IQ drops. It's not because of attraction. There's no hint of that; that's one trope that Ryder manages to avoid. She's both the token female and the token non-white. Fletcher is the series lead, the hero, so Ryder deprived Quadrado of her intelligence and competence to make Fletcher look better. He also has to rescue her several times. Yawn. And that final chapter. Wow. It sets up the series premise but it was so expected, so trite and so absurd. I've bought into the premise in other books but it didn't work for me in this one.

If you want a long book that is may not make sense and you don't mind cardboard characters, you just need to fill some time, then this might work for you. If you want an exciting action adventure story or an engaging mystery, keep looking.

It seems a lot of women go missing in or near the town of Daversville and one of those is the daughter of Fletcher Grants friend Don. Fletcher owes Don for saving his life during wartime and so he is going to do everything he can to find Lila but it seems the small town is very tight lipped on anything that happens in town.

Not long after asking about a young girl that worked at the diner,who was suppose to have warned Brad to get his woman and leave, is found dead Fletcher takes it as a warning. He also feels bad about getting the young woman killed. He is arrested for the crime by the deputy in town, but there is also a female FBI agent in town looking for what happened to all the missing women. Special Agent Quadrado thinks that Fletcher probably done it but after listening to him and finding out that the deputy did not tell her everything he is soon let go. She wants him to leave town but of course he doesn't do it.

Fletcher has his own way of doing things as he use to be a special branch of the military and he is not leaving till he finds out what happened to Lila. He riles the town up pretty good and gets himself into a lot of trouble. Meanwhile Agent Quadrado does her best to go by the book and look into the missing women but nobody will talk to her.

Soon they will both have to work together a bit to try and figure out what is going on in the town of Daversville.

I really wanted to like this one but in the end it was just sort of an average read. It was very stereotypical with a lot of the things that went on in the small town. It wasn't even hard to figure out what was going on in the town and I had pretty much figured out what was probably happening to the women halfway through the book. There were a few things that I didn't guess but for the most part I got it. I think what kept me reading this the most was wanting to know if Lila was still alive and if I was right about the women.

I wasn't really huge fan of either MC in the book. Fletcher was a very flawed individual and a man of many lives it seems. He was kind of a Rambo type character but got beat up more. Quadrado didn't seem like a very good FBI agent to me. My favorite character was Trench and he wasn't even in it very much but when he was it was good.

I did get a lot of action at the end which was nice but overall I thought the pacing was kind of slow. I think the cool stuff at the end sort of saved the book for me but just verily. I do think it might just be me as it seems to have a lot of praise on goodreads so take what I say with a grain of salt. Maybe it was just my mood as I have been very mood with my reading lately. So if you think it sounds cool give it a try!

A gripping and intriguing story that I throughly enjoyed.
It's well written, the plot is well crafted and the characters are well thought.
I can't wait to read the next installment in this series.
Highly recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

This is the first book to a new series and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Lila and her boyfriend were traveling in a small town when Lila disappeared. Fletcher owes her father so he takes on the case to find her. As he is searching for clues the townsfolk are trying to run him out of town. Then he finds out that a lot of women have disappeared while traveling through town. The owners of the sawmill seem to run everything in town and everyone is so grateful to the family.
Special Agent Zoey Quadrado has been sent to the town as well to investigate also and they nneed to work together. We learn of Fletcher's past and his stunt in the military. We also learn he is a single father.
Thank you to Bookouture and NetGalley for the ARC.

This is an intriguing mystery as ex-Marine Grant Fletcher tries to find the daughter of the the man who saved his life whilst they were in the military together. She had been travelling with her boyfriend when they stopped to eat. Whilst she went out for a smoke, he paid the bill. By the time he went outside she had disappeared without trace and the locals seem totally uninterested in helping find her.

He's not the only one searching for her. It seems fifteen young women have similarly mysteriously disappeared in that area during the last four years and FBI agent Zoey Quadrado has been sent to investigate. 

As both strive to discover just where the girls are and why they had been taken they find themselves working together and in danger. Are the locals involved? Why are they scared? Just who or what is Trench and why does the name appear to strike fear into the townsfolk? Can Grant and Zoey uncover the truth and rescue Lila without being made to disappear themselves?

This is an action packed read with plenty of mystery, lots of danger and peril along with some surprises en route. It is a great start to a new series and I can't wait to read future books featuring Grant and Zoey in future after reading the superb ending to this one!

I requested and was gifted a copy of this book via NetGalley and this is my honest review after choosing to read it.

Thank you to Bookouture for letting me take part in this tour and for my copy of this book via Netgalley. John Ryan is the pen name of Graham Smith and I LOVED the Beth Young series so I was excited for another book by this author.

Grant Fletcher is an ex-Royal Marine living in Utah with his daughter. Grant Fletcher might be ex-military but he isn't one to kill for the sake of killing. He's kept his morals despite all of the awful things he's been through. Grant is a man who will get things done.

Special Agent Quadrado is a very interesting character. There is lots more to learn about Zoey and I look forward to this as the series develops. I liked Zoey. I liked that she knew when to take charge and when to listen. Sure she makes a few mistakes but on the whole, she is a good agent and works well with Grant Fletcher.

This story is complex and extremely interesting. John wasn't afraid to get right into the nitty-gritty. Some of this book is difficult to read but for the most, it's a fastpaced crime thriller. It is the beginning of what promises to be an excellent series!

One of three stunning thrillers I read this past week, this one had all of the expected action and then some! Grant Fletcher (our hero) has an intriguing backstory. I liked him a lot. He actually reminded me a lot of Gibbs from “NCIS.” The setting (Daversville) was unique for several reasons, all of which gave angles and depth to what could have been a run-of-the-mill missper case. I enjoyed this book overall, and I look forward to future thrillers featuring Grant Fletcher. For a full review, please visit Fireflies and Free Kicks. Thank you to NetGalley and Bookouture for a digital ARC of the book.

This book opens with Lila disappearing from a diner after eating. Her boyfriend was unable to find any trace of her only has what the waitress told him which was “your woman is in danger you need to get her and leave”, he was too late. Now Grant Fletcher has come into town, he owes Lila’s father his life and he is repaying it by looking for her. Well, his mission is to find her and he will not be discouraged.
Who would think that this small town in Georgia would be the cause of the trouble? Daversville is just that though trouble and Fletcher find it. A former Royal Marine does not need to go looking for it, it comes to him. Even when F.B.I. agent Zoey Quadrado comes to town after noticing the trend of missing women she is looking at him as well.
She will come around and see that he is not part of the problem but one trying to create a solution. This new book is a fast read with action from beginning to end. A very good story that will keep you entertained. I liked everything about this book and especially Fletcher. Very much worth the read.

I mainly read police procedurals, but occasionally a character acting on their own for justice, drags me into their world and gets their hooks into me. Grant Fletcher, the hero in First Shot, is one such character and I am really pleased to be sharing my review for First Shot, the first in a brand new series by John Ryder.
I'm already champing at the bit to read the second Grant Fletcher story and, without giving too much away, was chuffed to bits with the ending that hinted at the direction the series might unfold into - believe me it'll take your breath away.
Well, the concept of this book is chilling - yet somehow all too believable. The idea of a Georgian town out in the sticks, with a lawlessness that allows out of town women, just passing through, to be abducted, is shockingly not beyond the realms of possibility, bearing in mind the number of people who disappear with no trace in the US annually.
However, Lila is one of the lucky ones - she'd got Grant Fletcher looking out for her and there's no better person for the job. Fletcher is one of those completely dependable , steady people - a dedicated single father, bringing up his child to the best of his ability, but with a shocking secret that haunts him contiually. He is a character I found myself rooting for from the start. He;s not just a one dimensional kick ass soldier. No, he's so much more than that. His character is perfectly nuanced. Yes he's tough, yes he'll take no crap ... but ultimately, his inner moral compass dictates the way he adresses the problems and situations around him.
I loved the way he wasn't afraid to use violence if under threat, but that he also wasn't drawn to use it as a first resort.
One of the things I liked best about this book was the action. And, let me warn you - there is action aplenty. But, more than the action, Ryder manages to balance high tension scenes with an assessment of the thought processes Fletcher goes through. How he reaches his split second decisions credits his intelligence and humanity.
So, basically Fletcher is a good guy, with high moral fibre, a guilty, tortuous secret and a heart of gold. The more I read, the more I was drawn to him. All too often these action men figures have littel character and rely on action to get the reader through to the end of the book. Not so with Grant Fletcher - he is beutifully crafted from the start and that makes him all the more appealing.
So, come on John Ryder, what are you hanging about for? Get cracking on Fletcher #2

Haaaaaaavvvvveee you met Grant? He’s your new go-to man…. missing daughter? He’s your man! Takes no sh!t from the jumped up yokels and knows how to defend himself….

I really took to Grant Fletcher the instant I met him. He’s a big boy who can handle himself both out on deployment in war torn zones but also in the small town close knit communities like Daversville. He’s not afraid to ruffle feathers but he knows where to draw the line….

As for Quadrado (mentally I’ve said that name several different ways but by the end she was Quadrado), she’s an interesting one. She’s not daft but she doesn’t trust easily and her relationship with Fletcher is not without bumps. But I liked her, she’s feisty! I can’t not mention the setting. The town of Daversville is a quirky one; you have to read First Shot to believe that but it’s a town stuck in what only can be described as an alternate world. It’s a strange one if I’m honest!

First Shot is a cracking thriller. I raced through desperate to know whether Fletcher found Lila and was she alive??! What was happening to the girls going missing in Daversville, the Bermuda Triangle of a town?? There is so much more I could say about this book but if I did, what’s the point in you reading it?? If you need a fast paced action thriller, then look no further! I’ll admit, this may not be my preferred genre but I seriously enjoyed the exhilarating ride!! I’ll be back Grant!!