Brad Gilbertson’s Lethal Harvest
Brad Gilbertson has written an entertaining, fast-paced and suspenseful thriller that is full of non-stop action and culminates with an unexpected plot twist at the end. The story captures the interest and attention of the reader from the first few pages and keeps the reader interested until the final page. Gilbertson does a good job of drawing readers into what the characters are feeling emotionally, helping readers to experience firsthand the situations the characters are involved in and to identify with the logic behind their decisions. The story is set in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the fictional city of Monte Vista, with vivid descriptions of the area.
In Lethal Harvest, Larry Riegert and his vicious brother, Chuck, escape the clutches of a drug cartel in Baja California. They move to Monte Vista, California to make a business deal with their uncle, Athan Fortino. When Athan suffers a stroke that leaves him in a coma, the brothers take advantage of their uncle’s failing health to embezzle money from Fortino Vineyards. They use the money to buy a unique cocaine production operation and set it up in an abandoned underground warehouse on their uncle’s property. To hide the operations of the cocaine factory, Larry takes control of Athan’s affairs, including the construction of a new warehouse. As the cocaine operation succeeds, it attracts the interest of people who are even more ruthless than Chuck.
Jason Beck is an architect hired by Athan and his seductive and invaluable business partner, Raquel Soltero, to design the new warehouse and oversee its construction. His life is full of difficulties; his wife has a mysterious problem he doesn’t understand, and his former employer turns out to be an unscrupulous competitor who is censoring Jason across the region. Jason needs the winery project to succeed if he’s to save his fledgling architecture studio and his career, and he’s desperate to save them both to keep their marriage from falling apart. When Larry Riegert takes over the warehouse project and it starts to go downhill, Jason becomes obsessed with finding out why.
After Jason’s family vacations in Mexico, Jason and Raquel get too close to the truth and the Riegert brothers try to scare them off. However, their attempt only makes Jason and Raquel even more curious, and the pair eventually discover that the brothers are dealing illegal drugs. Larry finds out about his discovery through clandestine means and the bullets start flying. Jason and Raquel run for their lives, but the Riegerts catch up.
Thirty miles away in Oakland, two narcotics cops investigating a crime scene uncover a massacre and clues pointing to Fortino Winery. They visit Monte Vista and stake out the warehouse property, where they find enough evidence to organize a joint agency hit team to raid the warehouse.
In the climactic scene, all the players who survive the raid come together in a terrifying confrontation and their lives are forever changed.
The violence in Lethal Harvest is contextual and realistic, but not graphic. There is only one scene of explicit sex, which reveals how the characters involved deal with the horrendous circumstances and emotional upheavals they are being subjected to. Profanity is kept to a minimum; it fits the characters and the situations they find themselves in.