The Bitter End is the third in the Fletcher Strand Thrillers, following Murder Down Deep (2023) and Winter's Dead (2022), a FINALIST in the BestThrillers Awards.

     "Della D'Augustine, or Aunt DD, as she was called by the man who would murder her a few days later, sat in her comfy chair agonizing over what had happened twenty years earlier, in the spring of 1974." And so begins the tale of Tony Pace, capo of a small-time mob in 1994's Rome, PA, once a thriving steel town but now, a corrupt hotspot where he and his underthugs prey on those craving illicit distractions of all kinds.

     It was Tony, her nephew, she now knew, who raped and murdered his cousin's 15 year-old daughter, and she resolved not to take it to her grave, and so, she wrote one letter to Tony accusing him, and one to his cousin,Frankie Forbici, demanding he avenge his daughter's murder.

     The letters go awry, and soon the murders begin, taxing Coroner McCreary and Pennsylvania Police Detectives Fletcher Strand & Joe Bentsen to their limits. When the end comes, it's one Strand could never have imagined, and it haunted him for months to come.