Jesse Cotsworth, a Special Forces Vietnam veteran, carried his covert skills into civilian life under the guise as a service station owner in an upscale suburb of Houston, Texas. His macabre death, however, exposes his association with a “Syndicate” whose agenda was revenge and assassination of known criminals who have escaped prosecution. Tanner gets trapped between the law, the Syndicate and Cotsworth’s killers in a series of strange twists that bring his past back to haunt him, and a new significance to the word, “Whitetail.” The plot weaves an unusual and enlightening look at the tentacles of thought that mold and follow a boy into manhood as well as a fresh treatment of the thriller’s themes of revenge and deception.

 

 

Reviews:

Whitetail, ISBN: 0974695904, by David Fey

 

-Whitetail has great interest for any hunter but it also has a suspense story that is really captivating. It is well told and keeps your interest at all times. I hated to put the book down. I would recommend it to anyone!

 

-Whitetail is the first book of the series and it was very good reading. The story was informative as well as exciting and kept me wanting more. When I finished I could not wait to start the second book. This is action at its greatest. I would love to see this as a movie!

 

-FROM HATEFUL BOYS TO VENGEFUL KILLERS—A FICTIONAL ODYSSEY

     The tentacles of this theme cleverly weave through the thriller’s plot of revenge initiated by the murder of Tanner’s best friend and the pure will to survive and protect his family.

    The development phase of young boys struggling with alcoholic parents in the fictitious WASP Mississippi Delta town of Lakewood leads the reader through the early chapters depicting the unruly characteristics of nasty little boys. Deke (named after his grandfather, Deacon), and his nemesis neighbor, Greg Stoner, fight bitterly at every turn in spite of their socially-knitted parents and their best-friend, do-gooder sisters. The two families classically dismiss their antics with a “Boys will be Boys” attitude (the title of the first chapter) until the bone-deep hate between the boys leads to the very edge of death, dividing the families and molding the boys’ attitudes forever.

     Fast forward a few chapters to adulthood and Tanner has mellowed, becoming a bright, successful international computer system salesman happily married and living in an upscale Houston suburb next door to his close friend and hunting buddy (“they could have been brothers” and “two men, one brain”), Jesse Cotsworth.  But Cotsworth, a local service station owner and amateur songwriter (Fey cleverly inserts lyric excerpts from his own compositions as a lead-in to several chapters), has a clandestine, sinister side stemming from his Special Forces training during Vietnam and has secretly become an “operative” for the Syndicate—an organization dedicated to eradicating known criminals who have somehow escaped prosecution. In an interesting, if not slyly humorous twist of events, Cotsworth draws the assignment to eliminate one Greg Stoner, now a feared lawyer in Lakewood. Cotsworth convinces the unsuspecting Tanner to book a deer hunting trip near Lakewood as the vehicle for the execution, but Stoner uncovers the plot and Cotsworth is mysteriously killed “by a pack of wild dogs during a hunting accident.”

      “Whitetail” is a fresh treatment on the thriller’s themes of survival and revenge highlighted by the events that bind the development of boys-to-men. One cannot help but applaud Fey’s ability to capture these oft-forgotten emotions and to reflect on the events surrounding their own development upon turning the last page.