Rick Philips has three dollars for gas, a negative bank balance, and an empty gallon of Smirnoff on his kitchen counter.
He also has two bullet scars, his dead mother's kidney, and a bestselling book he didn't actually write.
Once the only survivor of the worst school shooting in the country, Rick rode a wave of fame that crested before he turned twenty. Now he's a broke adjunct professor at a Virginia university, teaching students how to write while he hasn't produced a page in years. His dean has given him one semester to publish something ? anything ? or lose the only home he has left.
Then Harriet Bristol Wheeler walks into his life.
She tells him she's a serial killer. She tells him she's dying. She tells him he's going to write her story.
Harriet doesn't fit any profile. She changes her hair, her voice, her name, and her entire personality between meetings. She has twelve bodies scattered across the Eastern Seaboard and the Nevada desert. She has blackmail photos, a private jet, a brain lesion that may explain everything ? and a daughter she'll never see again.
Rick needs a book. Harriet needs a witness. The deal is simple.
Except Rick adds a condition: there will be a thirteenth name on her list. One that he chooses.
What follows is not a story about a detective solving a case. There is no detective. There is a man with PTSD and a drinking problem who agrees to visit crime scenes in his broken-down Chevy Prizm with a woman who once pinned him to a hotel bed and told him her secret while he was tied up with a pillowcase.
There is real neuroscience about what a brain lesion does to a person's ability to distinguish right from wrong. There is a prison visit with the school shooter who ruined Rick's life. There is a neighbor named Sam who might be the first good thing that's happened to Rick in a decade ? if Harriet doesn't destroy that too.
And there is a question the novel refuses to answer: When someone kills people who deserve to die, what do you call that?
Combustible Punch is a literary thriller for readers who found the humanity in Gone Girl, the moral weight of Mystic River, and the killer-interviewer tension of The Silence of the Lambs ? then wanted all three in the same book, narrated by someone honest enough to admit he's falling apart.
