Frank Shane is on the run--from his life

Frank popped another ephedrine tab, chased it with cold coffee, heard the opening strains of O ComeAll Ye Faithful, and punched it off. Had to be careful now to keep it on all-talk, carols becoming harder and harder to steer clear of. He nursed the rig back up to speed. Couple more days...
This time it broke loose for real

Richard Barre was born in Los Angeles and raised in California. He is the author of The Innocents (winner of the Shamus Award for best first P.I. novel), Bearing Secrets, The Ghosts of Morning, Blackheart Highway, The Star, and Burning Moon. Prior to writing crime fiction and short stories, he was a copywriter and creative director at his own advertising agency and wrote and edited travel publications. He lives in Santa Barbara with his wife, Susan.

From the foreword by Robert Crais:
Flip a switch, and life snaps into focus. The switch could be anything: a cancer scare, the way light catches in the spring-green leaves, those first crispy wrinkles that appear around your eyes, or a traffic accident in the middle of nowhere late on a frozen night.

Flip a switch, and suddenly the review of a life can be reduced to chilling absolutes: good or hopeless, rich or wasted, worthy or lost. No one judges us more harshly than we judge ourselves, and we are never more merciless with these self-assessments than when we are weak. In these times we see ourselves in the darkest light, without middle ground, and the reviews with which we damn ourselves can contain descriptives such as "failure" and "loser."

The switch is flipped, and we can spiral into hopelessness, seeing only our losses but never our gains.

But by the flip of that same switch...maybe we have a chance to see everything that is good in us and, in that moment, have one final chance at redemption.