The Bottom line: Everyone is a suspect in this perfectly paced, hard-hitting whodunnit.
When we first met private detective Freddy Ferguson in BestThrillers.com Book of the Year pick Gate 76, Freddy was 34-years-old and still largely defined by his former career as a prize fighter. Now pushing 40, the veteran PI is wiser and more perceptive, but still just as tough.
In 32 Minutes, Freddy is hired to find missing Chief Technology Officer Karl Larsson, whose last known location was a Sunday night visit to his corporate office. Early on, Freddy discovers that Larsson lives in a dump, once had a cocaine habit and is nearly a million dollars in debt. Adding to his troubles, a car crash while he was under the influence left him with a DUI and judgements from two civil suits. More recently, he fell off a ladder and started taking Percocet for the pain.
But here’s the real disconnect: just before his disappearance, Karl seemed to be growing more optimistic. According to his wife, he started looking at dream vacations: Paris, Nice, the Caribbean.
And it’s clear someone doesn’t want Freddy to find out what happened to Karl. Not long after he spots a blue Ford Explorer following him, Freddy finds himself fighting for his own life. And as Freddy gets deeper into the case, he won’t be the only one at his firm in danger.
In this meticulously crafted whodunnit, author Andrew Diamond ensures that nearly everyone has a motive for Larsson’s disappearance. Larsson’s wife and former security guard Cade Weller can’t be ruled out. And then there’s Karl’s boss, Leighton Graham, “the corporate equivalent of the malignant narcissist every woman seems to have met on Tinder.” Along the way, Diamond cleverly tackles toxic tech culture – especially what passes for leadership coming from the C-suite. Of one such exec, Freddy astutely observes, “He truly believed that those of us working unglamorous, underpaid jobs did so because we weren’t capable of doing better…The smart ones up top, like him, were put here to take advantage of the dumb ones down below, like me.” Every utterance Freddy observes on corporate leadership and society’s digital divide comes off as essential, hard-hitting truth.
Created to work as a stand-alone novel, 32 Minutes is a brilliant introduction to Freddy for first-time readers. Longtime fans of Diamond’s Claire Chastain series will cheer her appearance as well. Brace yourself for an action-packed, emotional ending.
