Don’t Send The Deputy: Book One (The Call - A Thriller Series 1)
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DON’T SEND THE DEPUTY
The Call - A Thriller Series - Book One
A wounded father calls 911 from a bullet-riddled vehicle on a dark North Central Idaho highway.
His wife has been shot. His sixteen-year-old son is missing. He is bleeding badly, and the nearest deputy is less than two minutes away.
Then he gives the dispatcher a warning that changes everything: “Don’t send the deputy. That’s who shot us.”
When responders reach the scene, Laura Mercer is dead, Daniel Mercer is barely alive, and their son, Ethan, has vanished into the darkness. Deputy Leo Diaz is missing too. His radio has gone silent. His patrol vehicle is later discovered abandoned near a river access.
Everything seems to point toward one of their own.
Clearwater County Sheriff Mack Mackenzie cannot afford loyalty, assumptions, or easy answers. Until the evidence proves otherwise, he must consider the possibility that a trusted deputy murdered a woman, wounded her husband, and disappeared with a teenage witness.
But the truth is moving through the darkness on two separate paths.
Ethan Mercer is alive and hiding. He saw something during the attack that his wounded father could not. More importantly, Ethan has a photograph on his phone, an ordinary picture taken days earlier at a little-used river access. He had no idea what was lurking in the background when he took it.
Now someone is willing to kill to make sure that photograph disappears.
Leo Diaz is alive too, wounded and fighting to survive after walking into an ambush designed to make him look guilty. Somewhere between the blood on the highway, an abandoned patrol car, a missing man named Martin Vale, and a towing business hiding more than damaged vehicles, the frame begins to crack.
Mack and his deputies have a narrowing window to find Ethan, find Diaz, and uncover what really happened before the men behind the attack erase the last witnesses who can expose them.
Because the most dangerous lie may be the one built around something a terrified man truly believes.
WHY YOU’LL LOVE THIS BOOK
- A page-one 911 call that launches the suspense immediately and turns an emergency response into a race against time.
- A gripping false-accusation mystery where the evidence appears to implicate a trusted deputy, and every discovery changes what investigators think they know.
- Two simultaneous survival battles as a hunted teenage witness and a wounded missing deputy fight separately to stay alive.
- A grounded rural investigation driven by evidence, search operations, dispatch, law enforcement, and believable human mistakes rather than impossible technology.
- An atmospheric North Central Idaho setting where highways, river access roads, darkness, distance, and rugged terrain become part of the danger.
- A complete standalone thriller with a resolved central mystery, recurring characters, lasting consequences, and the opening installment of a 12-book series.
INSIDE DON’T SEND THE DEPUTY, YOU’LL FIND
- Small-town crime and rural suspense
- Psychological suspense, pursuit, and escalating danger
- A dark but ultimately hopeful mystery where the truth must be earned one piece of evidence at a time
Don’t Send the Deputy is Book One of The Call - A Thriller Series *, a 12-book thriller series set across North Central Idaho. Every novel begins on Page One with a 911 call and delivers a complete emergency, crime, investigation, and resolution, while familiar dispatchers, deputies, sheriffs, paramedics, and search-and-rescue personnel return throughout the series.
One call. One accusation. Two missing people.
And somewhere in the dark, the truth is still alive.