Unlikely Hero - Richard Lowe

Trevor Kane is not a good man. He knows this. He has known it since he was fourteen years old, breaking arms in a juvenile detention yard, and he has spent the twenty-five years since confirming it in ways that would make decent people sick. Burglary. Violence. A body in Fontana he stepped over and never thought about again. He is precise, controlled, and completely without remorse. The California prison system tried to correct him twice. It only refined him.

Then he breaks into a warehouse in the wrong part of Los Angeles at two in the morning, looking for something to fence, and finds three men planning to detonate a nuclear device in downtown LA at rush hour.

He has sixty-two minutes.

Unlikely Hero follows Kane's desperate race across the Southern California desert as he pushes a stolen Dodge Challenger - and its cargo - toward the San Jacinto Mountains while the engine dies underneath him. Escorting him is CHP Officer Don Martinez, a twelve-year veteran who has built his entire career around documentation and evidence, and who is now betting everything on the look in a stranger's eyes at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.

The book moves between Kane, Martinez, the three men in the warehouse, and the investigators closing in - each chapter a different angle on the same catastrophe in motion. It does not flinch from what Kane is. It does not redeem him. It asks a harder question: what is the last true thing a man like that can do, and does it mean anything, and who gets to decide?

The answer arrives in a granite canyon east of Los Angeles, in the dark, with no witnesses.