Local author Matt Fitzpatrick returns with a Chatham-based thriller.

Where can you run to, when there’s nowhere left to hide? Such is Forsythia Shea’s conundrum. Ever since witnessing her father’s suicide as a young girl, it seems that life has been a series of jackpots and dead ends. New Hampshire didn’t work out, so she tried Manhattan’s Upper East Side—but when you’re pushing 35 years old and partying like you did at age 23, you find that life is leaving you behind and the only bridges you can see are the ones you’ve burned. After an alcohol-fueled binge of poor decisions leaves Forsythia in a jam with her boss—a tyrant of limited patience named Pratt—she bugs her neighbor for one last drink to steady the DTs, then boards a Greyhound for the last place that might take her: Chatham, and her crazy old aunt. Unbeknownst to Fory, as friends and acquaintances call her, everything is merely proceeding as planned.

Forsythia’s Ride is the fourth novel by Matt Fitzpatrick, a recent Chatham transplant, and he’ll be signing copies all day during its official launch on November 24th, at Yellow Umbrella Books on Main Street in Chatham. If you miss him there, he’ll be at the Eldredge Library for an afternoon event on December 13th. A dedicated crime and thriller author, Fitzpatrick holds true to the genre, but notes that his new story offers an uplifting twist: redemption. He dedicated Forsythia’s Ride to his wife Jennifer, who he calls, “The author of my Chapter 2,” and he says the experience of falling in love again, of marrying her in the summer of 2022, caused the infusion of optimism in his fiction. “You know what?...