JERICHO RD

A kidnapped teenage boy suddenly resurfaces.

Isaac Freeman, known to his friends and family as Zach, shows up at his high school in Arlington, Indiana, after disappearing for more than a year. He’s so unrecognizable that he’s initially mistaken for a drunk, homeless man. He’s in grim shape, carrying a bag filled with tens of thousands of dollars, narcotics, and a loaded gun. Upon medical inspection, his body shows ghastly signs of torture, including rape. Disoriented, frightened, and suffering from amnesia, Zach claims to have killed someone, though it’s unclear whom. Gradually, we learn that Zach was pulled into a dark human trafficking operation and forced into prostitution—a macabre predicament he narrowly escapes before they finally decide to kill him. The police, led by Detective Harold Minor, have reason to believe Zach’s captors are still out there, maybe even planning to silence him. Volz crafts a disturbing story that shines a glaring light on human trafficking. He approaches the subject matter with an appropriate sense of gravity and delicacy without sacrificing realism. However, it takes uncommon literary deftness to make such a story realistic but not gratuitously violent, an authorial nimbleness he simply does not possess. Words like devilish and evil come up too often, as if the reader needs these moral prompts. Also, the story devolves into a canned tale with the usual suspects.

A grisly tale that’s more nightmarish than artful.