Crash

What if you couldn’t remember the worst thing you’d ever done?

When Jed Allen wakes up at a desk in New York City, he has no idea who he is. The evidence around him shows he’s a hotshot architect, and a photo in his wallet reveals he has a beautiful girlfriend named Cassie. But when he goes home to seek her help, Cassie is nowhere to be found.

Self-penned notes remind Jed that he’s been suffering bouts of amnesia since a car crash nine months ago. As he plays private detective with the facts of his own life, he discovers more and more about his character. But when he finds a bloodied dress in the trunk of his car, amid news reports of a serial killer abducting women from Central Park, Jed has to confront the possibility that his lost memories could contain the darkest secrets imaginable…

Nobody around him has the answers to his questions. Who is the killer? And where has Cassie gone?

Ask Keith Houghton what he writes about and he won’t say crime or murder, even though these are major themes in his work. Instead, he’ll say contrasts and extremes.

When it comes to storytelling, what interests him are life’s polar opposites, both internally and externally—what pushes us to reach for the moral high ground or pulls us deep into our psyche. Moreover, his stories aren’t simply concerned with good versus evil, but also with the crossover between the two—the gray area where the line between right and wrong is often blurred. It’s not surprising, therefore, to see his good guys turn out to be half bad and his bad guys half good, all the while being drawn in opposite directions along plot lines split equally between denying truths and embracing lies. In the world of Keith Houghton’s imagination, not everything is black and white—sometimes it’s blood-red.

Keith Houghton is the author of the stand-alone psychological thrillers No Coming Back and Before You Leap, as well as the three Gabe Quinn thrillers: Killing Hope, Crossing Lines, and Taking Liberty.

To read more about Keith and his writing, please visit www.keithhoughton.com.