Give Up the Dead

A Jay Porter Novel

By: Joe Clifford

Narrated by: Timothy McKean

Three years have passed since estate-clearing handyman Jay Porter almost lost his life following a devastating accident on the thin ice of Echo Lake. His investigative work uncovering a kids-for-cash scandal may have made his hometown of Ashton, New Hampshire, a safer place, but nothing comes without a price. The traumatic, uncredited events cost Jay his wife and his son, and left him with a permanent leg injury.

Jay is just putting his life back together when a mysterious stranger stops by with an offer too good to be true: a large sum of cash in exchange for finding a missing teenage boy who may have been abducted by a radical recovery group in the northern New Hampshire wilds. Skeptical of gift horses and weary of reenlisting in the local drug war, Jay passes on the offer. The next day his boss is found beaten and left for dead, painting Jay the main suspect.

As clues begin to tie the two cases together, Jay finds himself back on the job and back in the line of fire.

©2017 Joe Clifford (P)2017 Cherry Hill Publishing, LLC

Critic reviews

"Another riveting novel by a master of the noir fiction genre…A simply riveting read from first page to last." ( Midwest Book Review)

Jay Porter is the unlikeliest of heroes

I love these Jay Porter novels! He is, or can be considered, a bit of a loser and yet, he rises to the top in the most unlikeliest of situations. I still want to smack him but in this book, not as much.

This listen had quite a few movable parts with all the upheaval and mystery centering around Jay. In his usual apathetic self, Jay starts out saying and doing the wrong thing. He does the right thing in the end and his journey is what makes these books hard to put down.

The narration is absolutely exceptional. McKean brings life to Jay and is definitely why the character feels so real and complex.

I hope there is a book four. This ending, though complete, feels like there is another version of Jay to come.