Midwest Book Review
5.0 out of 5 stars! Author Thomas Sawyer takes the tragic events of 9/11 and uses them for a solid action/adventure suspense thriller in NO PLACE TO RUN.
This is the story of Mace Merrick, a professional killer who ironically is serving time for a murder he didn't commit. Seeking to negotiate for his release, Mace has documents regarding a hit he carried out on contract the morning 9/11 happened. What follows is a high level cover-up, more deaths, and Claudia, a young lady who, along with her kid brother Adam, find themselves targets of rogue federal agents trying to tie up loose and embarrassing ends. Framed for their parents' murders, they take off on a cross-country race to stay alive long enough to figure out who killed their parents and discover a horrifying truth behind the infamous attacks of 9/11.
NO PLACE TO RUN is a tautly written page-turner of a thriller from beginning to end -- and a highly recommended read.
Jon Breen
Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine
Thomas B. Sawyer: NO PLACE TO RUN. Claudia Lawrence, twenty-four, is snatched from her happy life, along with her parents and teenage brother, when a secret revealed by a client to her lawyer father Bill lands them all in the witness protection program. The parents are murdered, and the kids go on the run, with government agents as the enemy. However you feel about 9/11 conspiracy theories, this is a model pursuit thriller, with mystery, menace, strong characters, and cross-cutting action managed with a screenwriter's flair. Murder, She Wrote, of which Sawyer was head writer, was nothing like this.
Conspiracy on the Run
Pam Linn
The Malibu Times
In his new thriller, No Place to Run, Malibu writer Tom Sawyer lays out the mother of all conspiracies. But this is not new territory for the veteran television writer who plots his narrative like a movie script, scene by scene, into a terrifying tale that grabs the reader from page one and never lets up.
As conspiracy theories go, this one is gripping as much for the way the innocent young protagonists are caught in its web as for the fact that it all could have happened just that way.
Sawyer said, “I absolutely, passionately believe that 9/11 was enabled by forces and interests high up in America-both government and commercial-people who knew it was in work could have prevented it, but decided instead that it offered an excuse for another war. Something upon which our entire economy and incredible prosperity has depended since World War II. Something that, as 2001 neared its end, it was time for once again.”
The story goes something like this: Fugitives Claudia Lawrence, 24, and kid brother Adam, 12, able to trust no one, thrown together in a baggage-heavy relationship, stay barely a step ahead of rogue federal agents determined to kill them as they race across the country, learn the truth about their parents' murders, and decipher the baffling puzzle that exposes a startling conspiracy not reported by the 9/11 Commission.
The character of Adam seems to have been drawn from Sawyer's own attitudes in childhood, which he said “invariably caused me to question authority, to regard it with automatic skepticism or outright contempt.”
Claudia, however, was more of a challenge. “My original concept was to tell the story of two fugitive brothers, but then I asked myself, what if the older one was female? That offered fresher, more dramatic possibilities in terms of her vulnerability and the potential for an edgier more interesting relationship between the two.”
Even the heavy, Vince Garrity, is not one-dimensional. An FBI agent turned bad, he orders his two cohorts to murder, and often pulls the trigger himself, with icy resolve. There's just enough back-story to explain his defection to the dark side and plenty of detail about how the agency works, but nothing slows the pace of the narrative.
Sawyer and I talked on the phone last week from the annual film festival in Eugene, Oregon, where he was teaching a screen and book writing course.
He outlined the entire 9/11 scenario: future hijackers known to be taking flight training, supposedly not monitored; the lack of USAF fighter planes in the Northeast Corridor and anywhere near Washington, DC on that day; and the “confusion” in which long-standing, previously followed protocols about what should happen when airplanes are hijacked or even go off course, were ignored.
“It was clear then, and now, that something was certainly not kosher,” he said. “In the writing trade, we refer to such things as ‘plot conveniences,' devices that, in fiction, are so obvious that they are to be scrupulously avoided.”
He added that with the “highly questionable” collapse of the Twin Towers and the cover-up of Flight 93 having been shot down, there are far too many such “Whoa - just a minute now” red flags.
Sawyer said he finds it difficult to imagine that anyone, on carefully reviewing as he did the events of that day, what led to them and what has followed, could arrive at any other conclusion.
Making that point was his main reason for writing the novel, he said. “It struck me that I might try via popular fiction to reach even a few people who wouldn't normally view things that way. All of us view the world and process what we see, hear and read through our own filters. But I continue to be boggled by how readily-eagerly, really, the public buys into the many lies we're handed.”
Watching that indelible spectacle on 9/11, Sawyer knew he perceived it differently from most people. “I was witnessing the single most dramatic statement of rage in the history of the world and the question it raised was: What does it take to make people that angry? That was quickly followed by my next question: Is anyone in America going to ask the first one?
“The answer was: No.”
His take on the reason for that refusal: “America is the World Capital of Denial. We seem congenitally unable or unwilling to question our own or our government's true motives.”
“Incidentally,” Sawyer added, “The 9/11 Commission Report, which appeared at about the time I was finishing 'No Place to Run,' failed to refute any of what my novel posits about the events of that day.”
Pat Browning - author of Absinthe of Malice
Dorothy L
Thomas B. Sawyer has such an inventive way with conspiracy novels that they leave the reader wondering if he made the whole thing up or if it might just have happened that way.
NO PLACE TO RUN’s opening lines:
There it was again.
Ticka-ticka-ticka-ticka…
He stopped breathing.
Then, almost as quickly as they had come the noises diminished, vanished. He exhaled. His pulse began to slow. Once again, the loudest sound in the murky foyer was his heartbeat.
A rat, probably. As frightened as I am. Strike that. Not even close. Bill Lawrence realized he’d lost count.
His fear bordered on terror. Not of getting caught—he was here, after all, with the tenant’s permission. At his request, actually. Nor was it the singularity of what he was doing. Skulking on his hands and knees in dark places was well outside Bill’s normal professional activities.
You might assume from the riveting first pages that Bill Lawrence is the protagonist. You might be right. You might be wrong. Things are not always what they seem in this Byzantine tale of the discovery of certain facts about the events leading to 9/11 – and the desperate, damn-the-costs attempt to prevent them from emerging.
What rogue federal agents do to protect a powerful Washington figure with a connection to the terror attacks of 9/11 makes for nasty business. Sawyer brings it down to human levels with a 24 year-old sister and her young brother running for their lives, trusting no one, not even the agent intent on saving them, as they try to solve the cryptic evidence uncovered by their father.
The 12-year-old brother, who has made a science of outwitting adults, adds a humorous note to this nail-biting, stomach-churning story.
Sawyer is a TV/film veteran and it shows in the quick cuts from scene to scene, with no wasted motion. The first few chapters are like the opening of a suspenseful movie. People appear and disappear with only the briefest of introduction or explanation. There are visuals – scraps of scratch-paper notes and news clips.
Along about page 50 the story stretches out a little with a bit of back story. But don’t get comfortable. The whole thing blows up with a shocking twist, and takes off in a different, unexpected direction.
To refresh my memory of a McGuffin, I did a quick check on Wikipedia and found this:
“Film Director/Producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized both the term and the technique. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, Hitchcock explained the term in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University: ‘[We] have a name in the studio, and we call it the 'McGuffin.' It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story. In crook stories it is almost always the necklace and in spy stories it is most always the papers.’"
Here, it’s the papers. Draw your own conclusions. Sawyer’s McGuffin propels the plot right up to the surprise ending.
As a postscript, Sawyer quotes President Eisenhower’s farewell address of Jan. 17, 1961, warning against the military-industrial complex. NO PLACE TO RUN is an exciting, satisfying, thought-provoking stomach-churner, one worth staying up late to finish.
A Real Page-Turner
Louise Paziak
This is a book that kept me reading into the wee small hours -- which is good if you have insomnia. Otherwise, I wouldn’t suggest reading it at bedtime!
NO PLACE TO RUN by Thomas B. Sawyer is a riveting page-turner, perfect for a lazy weekend by the pool.
Attorney Bill Lawrence’s world comes crashing down when his client, a professional hitman, decides to buy his way out of a conviction for a murder he didn’t commit. His ticket to freedom -- evidence of a contract he carried out on the morning of September 11, 2001.
Armed with the dangerous documents, Lawrence immediately enters his family into the Witness Protection program. This doesn’t sit too well with Bill’s 24-year-old daughter, Claudia, who resents being ripped from her job and boyfriend. But the next morning a bomb kills her parents and Claudia is set up for their murder. She and her 12-year-old brother become fugitives, on the run from both local law enforcement and the rogue FBI agents out to kill them.
Can Claudia find the evidence she needs to clear her name and avenge her parents’ deaths? Will she live long enough to expose the horrifying truth behind the events on 9/11?
Author Thomas B. Sawyer has written the first novel to theorize that the 9/11 hijackers received help from forces high up in the government. If anything, the book will make readers take a fresh look at the 9/11 commission’s report.
Stefanie Auerbach Stolinsky, Ph.D.
NO PLACE TO RUN is Tom Sawyer delivering with a vengeance. Well written, exciting, page-turning and very thought-provoking. I loved it and not only recommended it to all my friends, but sent it out as my only Christmas presents. Tom really has his finger on the pulse of America. There is no doubt in my mind that this book traverses political ideology to make you think, to scare you to death and told by a storyteller who's just about as good as they come.
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