J.L. Vantrees
J.L. Vantrees
Author

J.L. Vantrees

J.L. Vantrees served more than twenty years in the U.S. Army, long enough to learn to watch the person who stays calm while everyone else is shouting. Vantrees writes domestic thrillers about ordinary people who notice the wrong thing at the wrong moment, and about what it costs them to do something about it. Who Took Wesley Kane is the first J.L. Vantrees novel. Vantrees is at work on the next one.

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My books

Cover of The Night Study

The Night Study

A Domestic Thriller of Buried Family Secrets

Rear Window by way of the sleep lab: a night-shift tech hears a sleeping stranger describe the crack in her basement floor, and the bucket her husband held the night someone went under it.

At 2:40 a.m., deep in REM, the trucker in Room 4 tells sleep tech Dawn Parrish exactly how to kick open the stuck laundry chute in her own kitchen.

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By his third study he’s sitting up with his eyes shut, gripping an invisible bucket and telling her husband to hold it still, and on Saturday a crew is coming to pour a fresh slab over all of it.

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Cover of Who Took Wesley Kane

Who Took Wesley Kane

A Kidnapping Thriller

When a Houston oil heir’s nine-year-old son vanishes with his tutor, the whole country hunts her as a kidnapper, but she’s the only one who knows the ransom note was written by the boy’s father, and why he needs his son dead.

Rae Dillard spent her childhood in eleven foster homes. She knows what it looks like when an adult decides a kid is a problem to be solved.

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For fourteen months she’s tutored Wesley Kane in his family’s River Oaks mansion. Then, one night in June, she hears his father on the phone arranging a kidnapping that’s supposed to end with a body in the Gulf. Hers and Wesley’s.

So Rae takes him first.

By morning her face is on every screen in Texas. A ransom note demands four million dollars, and Grant Kane is on camera begging for his son. Rae has a juvenile record, forty dollars, a boy with asthma, and a man hired to finish the job closing in behind her.

FBI Special Agent Dana Okafor has worked child abductions for twelve years. She knows how kidnappers behave. Rae Dillard doesn’t behave like one. She packed his inhaler. She keeps him in school clothes. And the ransom note arrived before anyone outside the house could have known the boy was gone.

Every manhunt has a villain. This one is chasing the wrong woman.

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