River City #19: A River City Novel
An undercover cop and a vigilante uncle are pitted against the human trafficking industry in River City.
Detective “Gus” Dow works deep undercover in the sex slave industry as a woman who buys and sells other young women. She’s committed to her mission to bring the traffickers to justice but how long will that take? How much misery can she watch and still walk the line between duty and human decency?
“Bull” Porter blurs those lines when he finds out his niece is kidnapped. Rather than hunting in the wilds, he stalks his prey on the dirty streets of River City’s underbelly where the hunted can turn the tables in an instant. How far will Bull go to save his niece? What lines will he cross?
When Gus and Bull collide in their battle to rescue the latest victims, the stakes escalate to include not only freedom and family, but also careers and life itself, hanging in the balance. Everything has a tradeoff and both Gus and Bull must decide what’s worth losing to save what’s worth saving… if they can.
Author’s Note: The Trade Off began life as a collaboration with B.R. Paulson but in 2022, it was heavily revised to become part of the River City series.
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Reviews:
“This is the story of the sex slave industry in the Pacific Northwest. It is set chiefly in Spokane, Washington. It is a work of fiction but upon reading it I must wonder if parts of it may be taken from true events. There are two viewpoint characters, Gus and Bull… Gus is an undercover detective who slips into the sex trade area to help the young women caught up in the maze and obtain information for her boss to close down the operation. Bull rushes into the maze to find and free his niece, Taylor who is just a teenager. Gus moves from her undercover spy role to a loose cannon approach when she learns the police operation is about to come to a close leaving Taylor and another girl behind. Bull only knows how to use force to find and rescue his niece. Bull and Gus cross trails in the race to rescue Taylor in an interesting way. In the end there is a trade off between good police work and a successful rescue.”
— Michael Mardsen, from a 4-star Amazon review
“The Trade Off is a thought-provoking look at some of the issues involved in sex trafficking that affect women and girls all over the world. It is also a suspenseful, action-packed story that should appeal to people who liked the Taken movies. Much like those films, the book focuses on two protagonists who possess “a certain set of skills” as they do everything they can to save a teenage girl… Zafiro keep[s] the action grounded in reality in ways that make it easy for readers to willfully suspend disbelief … To me, using locations such as Pasco or Spokane helps drive home the grim reality that the kinds of horrible acts the villains in the book commit could happen almost anywhere. It also helps prove that a crime story doesn’t have to be set in a big city like New York or Los Angeles to be fascinating and entertaining.”
— Brian Triplett, independent reviewer
The River City Series Continues in…
