Vinnie Hansen

How much havoc can one gun wreak? That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it? The answer is simple: a lot. And in ways that could never have been imagined.

The story starts out simple enough: Vivi and Ben Russo startle a young burglar in their home. When the thief rushes out of the house, Ben’s amygdala fight or flight response kicks in and it’s fight. Or at least give chase. He’s in pretty good shape for a man his age and keeps better pace than the young man would have expected. Until finally the thief turns around and points a gun at Ben and threatens to kill him. He doesn’t fire and runs away.

But Ben’s fight response is fully aroused. The police capture the thief in a very short time – but there’s no gun. For Ben, however, catching the thief isn’t enough. His life was threatened and he wants that young man prosecuted for armed robbery, and Ben won’t let up until he proves there was a gun.

There is a lot going on under the surface in this book. We learn just enough to be intrigued but not enough to fully understand the relationships or what has occurred in the past. But Ben’s quest to find that gun almost becomes a vendetta. In addition to “you can’t do this to me” there is some “he’s a rotten kid, just like all the rest.” Is this because of Ben’s rocky relationship with his son? Whatever the reasons, he is not giving up the quest to find that gun. As for Vivi, at first she thinks Ben is crazy for pursuing the thief and putting his life in danger. It’s just stuff, after all, that can be replaced. She has some very bad moments wondering if Ben is going to make it back, and when the police car pulls up, before she sees Ben step out, she thinks they are there to tell her Ben has been killed.

Then Vivi decides that it’s now just the thing for her and Ben to become amateur sleuths and find that gun. They try to put themselves in the mind of the thief, retrace what they think was his escape path in searching for the gun. Vivi’s reasons are a little less clear than Ben’s but she is every bit as committed – and reckless – to continue the search.

One Gun is riveting. Vivi and Ben’s community is not so much close-knit as a tangled web, where good and bad, law-abiding and criminal connect and converge and overlap through school and business and youth at risk and just happenstance meetings. It’s like a six degrees of separation thing: the home repair man has an employee who knows someone who has a brother who has an ex-girlfriend who has a baby . . . it goes on and on, unknown to the players themselves how closely they are tied to the others, with some very tragic consequences.
One Gun is complex and fast-moving, with secrets and relationships not being what they seem, and running throughout is the suspense of the hunt and the fear that more and more people are going to be pulled in and more and more bad things are going to happen. It’s an exciting story of how one event can cause a dangerous ripple, of the impact one gun can have.

Thanks to author Vinnie Hansen for providing an advance copy of One Gun in exchange for my honest review. I enjoyed the action and the motives and manipulation between and among characters, including Vivi and Ben, gave the story satisfying depth. I recommend One Gun without hesitation. It’s true, you won’t be able to look away. All opinions are my own.… (mehr)