Lethal Harvest by Brad Gilbertson

Brad Gilbertson has written a fast-paced, entertaining, suspenseful thriller that’s packed with non-stop action and culminates with an unexpected plot twist at the end. The story captures the reader’s interest and attention from the opening pages and keeps the reader interested until the final page. Gilbertson does a good job of drawing readers to what the characters feel emotionally, helping readers to experience first-hand the situations the characters are involved in and to identify with the rationale behind their decisions. The story takes place 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 health problems to embezzle money from Fortino Vineyards. They use the money to buy a unique cocaine production operation and install it 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 building a new warehouse. As the cocaine operation becomes successful, it attracts the interest of people who are even more ruthless than Chuck.

Jason Beck is an architect hired by Athan and his attractive and invaluable business partner, Raquel Soltero, to design the new warehouse and supervise its construction. His life is full of difficulties; His wife is having a mysterious problem that she doesn’t understand, and his former employer has turned out to be an unscrupulous competitor who is cheating on Jason across the region. Jason needs the winery project to succeed if he is to save his fledgling architecture studio and career, and he’s desperate to save both of them to prevent their marriage from falling apart. When Larry Riegert takes over the winery project and begins to go downhill, Jason becomes obsessed with finding out why.

After Jason’s family goes on vacation to Mexico, Jason and Raquel get too close to the truth and the Riegert brothers try to scare them away. However, their attempt only makes Jason and Raquel even more curious, and the pair ultimately determine that the brothers are dealing illegal drugs. Larry learns of his discovery through clandestine means and the bullets begin to fly. Jason and Raquel run for their lives, but the Riegerts catch up with them.

Thirty miles away in Oakland, two narcotics cops investigating a crime scene uncover a massacre and accompanying clues pointing to the Fortino winery. They visit Monte Vista and guard the winery property, where they find enough evidence to organize a joint agency assault team to raid the winery.

In the climactic scene, all the players who survive the raid come together in a terrifying showdown and lives are forever changed.

The violence at Lethal Harvest is in context and realistic, but not graphic. There is a single explicit sex scene, which reveals how the characters involved deal with the dire circumstances and emotional upheavals they are being subjected to. Profanity is kept to a minimum; It fits the characters and the difficult situation they are in.