Publication day is always an exciting time for an author and today it’s the turn of Gary Corbin whose latest crime novel, The Injustice of Valor, hits the bookshops today. I’m delighted to bring you an excerpt from the book, which is the sixth outing for Officer Valorie Dawes of the Clayton Police Department. I’ve read several of the previous books in the series – A Better Part of Valor, Mother of Valor and Under the Banner of Valor – and I’m looking forward to getting stuck into this one. (You can read my reviews by following the links from the titles.)
Gary is keen to support independent bookshops and to encourage readers to use alternatives to the big online retailers, including for ebooks and audiobooks. You can find more information on his website. Enough of the sales pitch, let’s find out more about the book…
About the Book
When the cops and courts fail, The Redeemer exacts his own form of justice.
When the bodies of freed sex offenders turn up with increasing regularity in western Connecticut, the Clayton Police Department responds with a disinterested yawn.
Second-year cop Val Dawes doesn’t share the department’s apparent indifference to the trend of vigilante justice. But her warnings fall on deaf ears, especially after her jealous rivals in the department get her suspended on a bogus assault charge.
Then her best friend in the department, a trans woman named Shelby, goes missing under suspicious circumstances.
Can Val find her friend before she, too, falls victim to a deranged vigilante?
Extract from The Injustice of Valor by Gary Corbin
The Wolf Moon ducked behind the clouds seconds after the power grid failed, plunging the small Berkshires town of Greenville, Connecticut into unexpected darkness. No home lights pierced the gloom. The seasoned veterans of year-round rural living, many of whom had already gone to bed, hadn’t yet switched over to their generators. The few still awake knew that these outages, so common in the mountains in winter, rarely lasted longer than a few minutes. Fewer still drove anywhere that late, so the winding roads like Torrington River Highway and Valley Park Drive remained unlit by glaring headlights.
It was the perfect time and place to dump a body.
The corpse splashed into the Torrington River’s swift current almost exactly midway between sunset and sunrise on the 14th of January, in the year 2020.
Stirred up by stiff winds and threatening rain, the river swallowed the body into its black depths within seconds, each crash of whitecaps against the surface an exclamation point to its haughty declaration: You are mine. Nothing but food for the fishes, more bones to litter its cluttered floor.
So it happened, anyway, in the imagination of The Redeemer, who dumped the body down the rocky embankment into the frothy cascades below. No time to wait around to see the fish devour the victim’s flesh. Unfortunate. To have seen the muscle and skin torn from bone would have been the evening’s crowning achievement. Ridding the planet of another sex offender who’d escaped justice, freed on some bullshit technicality argued by unethical lawyers, was a sight to be witnessed. Savored, even. Hell, the lawyers responsible for the perv’s freedom should join the fray.
Perhaps someday they would. In a perfect world, the event would be televised.
But not tonight. Tonight the world became a better place, with one less sicko to prey upon the innocent. One fewer person—or perhaps several—would risk the painful, humiliating experience of that almost unimaginable violation of their body.
Almost unimaginable. To the unlucky few, they were all too imaginable.
Unforgettable, even.
About the Author
Gary Corbin is an author and playwright in Camas, WA. Raised in a small town in New England, Gary has also lived in Louisiana (Geaux LSU Tigers!), Indiana (Go Hoosiers!), and Washington, DC.
Gary’s series feature page-turning plots, flawed but lovable protagonists, and bad guys you love to hate. His plays have enjoyed critical acclaim in regional and community theaters. Gary is a member of the Willamette Writers Group, The Writer’s Dojo, PDX Playwrights, and ALLi.
A homebrewer and coffee roaster, Gary loves to ski, cook, and watch his beloved Red Sox and Patriots. He hopes to someday train his dogs to obey. (Photo: Author website)
Connect with Gary
Website | Facebook | Bluesky
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