The Shock Of Night – by Patrick Carr – CSFF Blog Tour Day 1

Today is Day 1 of the CSFF Blog Tour, and we are covering non other than the newest novel—THE SHOCK OF NIGHT—by award winning author Patrick W. Carr!

And to start off with, let’s learn a little about Patrick, so here’s the bio from his website:

Patrick W. Carr was born on an Air Force base in West Germany at the height of cold war tensions. He has been told this was not his fault. As an Air Force brat, he experienced a change in locale every three years until his father retired to Tennessee. Patrick saw more of the world on his own through a varied and somewhat eclectic education and work history. He graduated from Georgia Tech in 1984 and has worked as a draftsman at a nuclear plant, did design work for the Air Force, worked for a printing company, and consulted as an engineer. Patrick’s day gig for the last eight years has been teaching high school math in Nashville, TN. He currently makes his home in Nashville with his wonderfully patient wife, Mary, and four sons he thinks are amazing: Patrick, Connor, Daniel, and Ethan. Sometime in the future he would like to be a jazz pianist, and he wrestles with the complexity of improvisation on a daily basis. While Patrick enjoys reading about himself, he thinks writing about himself in the third person is kind of weird.

Now Patrick’s writing has won two different awards—The CAROL AWARD, as well as our very own CLIVE STAPLES AWARD. On top of that, he has also a finalist in the CHRISTY AWARD and the INSPY AWARD. The neat thing is that I was present at the 2014 ACFW Banquet when he received his CAROL AWARD, so that was fun, and that also allowed me to get acquainted with Patrick a bit.

The premise of THE SHOCK OF NIGHT is really cool—it’s almost like having someone who is part Sherlock Holmes and part Aragorn in a fantasy world. Here’s the novel’s description from Amazon:

When one man is brutally murdered and the priest he works for mortally wounded on the streets of Bunard, Willet Dura is called to investigate. Yet the clues to the crime lead to contradictions and questions without answers. As Willet begins to question the dying priest, the man pulls Willet close and screams in a foreign tongue. Then he dies without another word.

Willet returns to the city, no closer to answers than before, but his senses are skewed. People he touches appear to have a subtle shift, a twist seen at the edge of his vision, and it’s as though he can see their deepest thoughts. In a world divided between haves and have-nots, gifted and common, Willet soon learns he’s been passed the rarest gift of all: a gift that’s not supposed to exist.

Now Willet must pursue the murderer still on the loose in Bunard even as he’s pulled into a much more dangerous and epic conflict that threatens not only his city, but his entire world–a conflict that will force him to come to terms with his own tortured past if he wants to survive.

Tomorrow I’ll evaluate a bit of Patrick’s writing, and then the full review will come on day 3.

Make sure you visit the other tour members: