From the Lawrence Journal-World
SUSPENSE NOVEL HAS ROOTS IN SMALL-TOWN KANSAS
Two seemingly unrelated encounters in a tiny Kansas berg inspired the twisted plot of Riley Evans' Devil May Care.
As Evans drove through the small town, killing time before an appointment, he happened upon an old Bible college. The smattering of buildings lay long empty except for a grand, barn-style revival hall where, much to Evans' surprise, a hellfire-and-brimstone gathering was unfolding just as he passed.
"You could hear the voice of a preacher at the pulpit," he recalls." There was this old gentleman sitting in one of the back pews. He was dressed like somebody that would have watched the Scopes trial, and he was sitting there fanning himself with a program, kind of rocking back and forth with the rhythm of the sermon."
Evans filed away the anachronistic image.
Later, as he flipped through the newspaper that serves the town of 500, he noticed several classified ads placed by couples seeking to adopt newborns.
The seeds were planted.
Evans let his fiction-crafting mind go to work, and by the end of his novel he had managed to connect the revival scene to the adoption inquiries--albeit in a manner morbid enough that he felt more comfortable publishing the book under a pen name.
Devil May Care opens with Kansas State Police field agent Nikki O'Keefe uncovering a horrifying crime scene: six infant skulls, none much larger than an orange, crudely buried at a campsite in fictional Pawnee Bend, Kansas. Within days, another skeleton—this one the remains of a teenage girl—is discovered in a pasture outside town.
Soon, the industrious O'Keefe begins to question why the Reverend Jack Jackson, a televangelist and iron-pumping promoter of Christian fitness centers, is showing up in all the wrong places. While investigating his possible connection to the homicides, O'Keefe encounters an adoption ring and a satanic cult.
Evans' heroine is ambitious, the author says, "and that drive tends to lead her to put herself into situations where she doesn't have backup and she's kind of out on her own. So she walks into trouble and has to get herself out of it fairly often."
Perhaps the most convincing endorsement for fans of the suspense genre is Evans' admission that he frightened himself while penning the novel.
"While I was writing that I really kind of spooked myself out," he says of a chapter about a satanic ritual. "I decided to go out for lunch."
Taken from an article by Mindie Paget of the Lawrence Journal-World
[ back to top ]
From the Heartland Reviews
This is a story of the heartland—Kansas. State Police Investigator Nikki O’Keefe crosses swords with TV Evangelical and body builder Jack Jackson, to determine where a grave site full of dead babies came from. The lines of good and evil are crossed by local Satan worshipers and definitely smudged by the so-called good guys. Nikki is assisted by a sympathetic local sheriff and a hot-shot fellow investigator who comes from her own Kansas City Italian neighborhood.
Nikki is torn constantly by the glass ceiling, the good-old-boy network, and the crazy locals. The author shows us that there is a lot of craziness out there, even in the heartland. We rated this book four hearts.
Bob Spear, Heartland Reviews
[ back to top ]
Publisher's Review
An ice storm pummels the rural Midwest in Riley Evans' Devil May Care. Pellets of freeze create hoary, elegant skeletons on the picked-over tractor and combine wreckage in Pawnee Bend, Kansas. Although the storm occurs later in the book, the slick glistening sleet is an apt metaphor for the entire novel. The reader hears two menacing tones, the sharp crack of tree branches succumbing to the crushing force of glittering ice, and the snap of neck bones squeezed by the fingers of those blessed and those chosen. In this book, the beautiful covers the ugly.
Riley Evans disturbs the placid conservative landscape of rural America. He uses Pawnee Bend and its pastoral surroundings to create a guise for an undertow of tumult and menacing disorder. Little Ernie Paris discovers small bones—baby bones—under the lush autumn decay of leaves at Hedge Row School, a campground for retarded kids. Kansas State Police field agent Nikki O’Keefe first investigates the scene. Agent O’Keefe is an anomaly, a misfit, a Kansas City woman cop demoted to the backwaters of farm country. She’s gorgeous and she’s tough. Her Irish-Italian heritage makes her exotic in a way not usually found in a small town. But Nikki’s ambition is a driven machine. Failure brought her to this place and only merit can take her away.
When a farmer happens upon a second body, the skeleton of a teenage girl, Nikki’s superiors in the state police arrive at the scene and complicate the story. Once again, Nikki finds herself on the lowest rung. However, the pile of bleached and dusty bones in the pasture also brings an iron-pumping reverend. Jack Jackson preaches a gospel of perfect body and perfect soul. One conversation with Agent O’Keefe, and Reverend Jack knows she mocks his message. Her keen intuition and powers of observation see beyond his Italian suit, his hidden wrinkles, and his manicured fingernails. He recognizes her as his temptress, his nemesis, his devil.
[ back to top ]
