Review: South of Nowhere by Jeffrey Deaver

 

South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5) by Jeffrey Deaver

Publication Date: May 6th 2025 by G.P. Putnam's Sons

Pages: 414

Source: Publisher

Rating: ★★★★½

Links: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo | Libro.fm | Audible | Goodreads

My Thoughts:

Colter Shaw is a “reward-seeker” traveling all over to find missing persons or things and then collects the reward money when successful. His unusual upbringing by a paranoid survivalist father prepared him for a multitude of dangerous situations, which makes him good at his job.

 

Colter gets called out, by his sister Dorian, to Northern California when a levee starts to wash out and threatens the small town of Hinowah. Dorian, a disaster specialist, was already close by when she heard what happened and offered to help since the town leaders didn’t seem equipped to handle a situation of this magnitude. Is the impending collapse the result of poor construction or something more sinister?

 

There’s also the mystery of a woman asking to find the location of the Shaw’s family compound and Colter finds some disturbing information while searching through his father’s papers.

 

South of Nowhere was a thrilling, action-packed story with several riveting subplots and I was hooked from the start! A few revelations took me by surprise.

 

Even though I’ve only read the prequel novella, Captivated in this series, I feel like you could read South of Nowhere as a standalone.  I did watch a few episodes of Tracker, which are based on these books. I’ll be adding the previous installments to my TBR since I enjoyed this one so much.

4.5 Stars

Book Description:

The New York Times bestselling master of suspense returns to his beloved series, adapted for TV (CBS's Tracker, starring Justin Hartley) as reward seeker Colter Shaw races against the clock to save a flooding town from a full-fledged disaster, where the culprit lurks in the plain sight.

When a levee collapses in Hinowah, a small town in Northern California, Colter Shaw is brought on by his sister, Dorion, a disaster response specialist, to help locate a family swept away by the raging water, with mere hours to survive. 

But after a surprise attack along the river obstructs Colter's urgent search, the siblings are forced to consider a new Is the levee at risk of failing from natural causes, or is someone sabotaging it? Colter and Dorion must race against a ticking clock to uncover the truth and save the citizens before the village washes out completely, destroying everything and everyone in its path.