The Bitter End is the third in the Fletcher Strand Thriller series, following Murder Down Deep (2023) and Winter's Dead (2022), a Finalist in the 2023 BestThrillers competition.
Once again, Pennsylvania State Police Detectives Fletcher Strand and Joe Bentsen are thrust into a situation that turns deadly in 1994's corrupt Rome, PA, once a center of steel mills and full employment, but now a focus for crime controlled by the same mob family for generations.
"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 sordid tale of Tony Pace, head of a small-time mob in Rome, Pennsylvania, where his father-in-law began a crime family that would prey upon Rome's steel valley workers for decades. Only, Tony could never have imagined that his very elderly aunt would wake up one morning remembering a detail that convinced her Tony raped and murdered his own niece twenty years earlier. Aunt D'Augustine writes a letter to each of her nephews, Tony Pace and Frankie Forbici, accusing Tony of the crime and prodding Frankie to avenge his daughter's murder, but in her haste and confusion, she puts Tony's letter in Frankie's envelope, and Frankie's in Tony's.
Tony receives his letter, but Frankie's is lost, thus adding to the suspense about Frankie's likely revenge. To cover up his crime, Tony disposes of Aunt DD, but Mercer County Coroner Jack McCreary's keen instincts convince him she was not just another murder victim, the eldest relative of a local mob kingpin.
Because Rome's city administration and its police department had earlier been identified as a corrupt entity, the Attorney General directs that the Pennsylvania State Police assume jurisdiction for all serious misdemeanors and felonies there, an unusual step that allows PSP Detectives Fletcher Strand and Joe Bentsen to become involved in the death of Della D'Augustine and the series of homicides that occur shortly thereafter.
The mystery becomes compounded when Tony Pace himself is found murdered in his own burned out, highly prized and pricey BMW. Suspects abound, from Tony's cousin, Frankie, Frankie's wife, Darlene, Tony's underbosses, Rome's mayor, and others with a strong motive to eliminate him. Not least amongst them are Tony's girlfriend, Stella Kaminski, and her father, both of whom have reasons that are purely personal.
To sort out the mess of murders, Strand and Bentsen doggedly pursue every lead during a snowy Rome winter, and eventually, they're driven toward a solution neither detective could ever have imagined, but one which would haunt Strand for months to come. Join them as they sort through one homicide after another, all to cover up a never-solved crime from twenty years earlier. Another thriller not to be missed.