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No Way Back is Andrew Gross's 2013 standalone thriller, the kind of high-concept domestic-thriller that Gross writes more efficiently than most current authors in the lane. Wendy Gould, a New York mother on a routine errand, witnesses a murder in a Manhattan hotel and runs. The killer, a man named Vito, comes for her family. Wendy spends the next 300 pages running toward the only place where she might be safe and toward the only person who might believe her.
Gross's structural strength is what carries this one. The opening hotel-witness sequence is engineered to put Wendy on the run within twenty pages. The middle section is dual-POV (Wendy in flight, a federal agent named Hauck trying to track who Vito actually works for) and pays off in a third-act convergence the genre rarely manages this cleanly. Vito is one of the better Gross antagonists, with a credible operational doctrine.
Recommended for fans of high-concept domestic thrillers (Harlan Coben's Tell No One, Linwood Barclay's No Time for Goodbye) and for readers looking for books like No Way Back in the witness-on-the-run subgenre. Solid four stars, and one of Gross's most reliable standalones.
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