Out of the Past: A Callie and Cash Thriller by Burt Weissbourd
A troubled, depressed man who is having disturbing dreams goes to a therapist seeking answers. But, when he and the therapist begin to explore his life for clues, the horrors from his past suddenly come alive as a real-life nightmare that puts him and his loved ones in grave danger.
That’s the fascinating premise of Out of the Past, the third book in Burt Weissbourd’s Callie and Cash series — a twisty, fast-moving thriller that provides one shocking surprise after another.
A Long-Buried Past
The key characters are colorful soldier of fortune Cash Logan and celebrated restauranteur Callie James who live in Seattle and share an extremely … well, unconventional relationship. This book begins with a flashback to their previous adventures together when Cash discovered that he was the father of a long-long daughter who has just given him a three-month-old grandson.
But Cash — for reasons no one, including him, can understand — has become irrationally unhappy, angry at times with his friends and worried about the safety of his daughter and grandson. That’s when Callie convinces him to go to the therapist for help. The results turn out to be much different than either of them expected as the therapist encourages Cash to dig into the unpleasant memories from his past, all the way back to childhood. They eventually focus on the story of his parents who died in a car accident when Cash was only 7.
It soon becomes apparent that the actual details of his parents’ long-ago car crash are totally different from what he has always believed, and that the nightmares he’s having now are real ones — threatening the lives today of him and Callie and his daughter Sara and the three-month old grandson known as Baby Cash. The situation escalates even more dramatically with an $18 million ransom demand from a monstrous, mysterious man from Cash’s own past — someone he thought was long gone from his life — who threatens to kill them all unless he gets the money.
At various points, the reader becomes convinced that the four of them — Callie, Cash and Cash’s new family of Sara and Baby Cash — must be doomed as they are put in perilous positions they seemingly have no way to escape. But, of course, Weissbourd comes up with clever solutions to keep them all safe from the terrifying dangers they face.
Twists and Turns
The other characters in Out of the Past — in addition to Cash and Callie — are very fascinating people too. There’s a group of them who are Cash and Callie’s allies: a wealthy diamond trader known as Itzac, a.k.a. the “Macher;” Seattle detective Ed Samter, a longtime partner and friend; Andre, a prosthetic-legged Afro-Caribbean mercenary; and the new therapist Abe Stein, who turns out to be able to provide much more than medical aid to Cash as he joins the effort to keep him and his loved ones safe. There’s a wonderfully comic scene in the beginning where Stein accidentally sets papers on his desk on fire from a pipe he’s smoking during a session, which makes you realize this guy is no ordinary therapist!
The bad guys are pretty interesting too, and damn scary! There’s an ex-con known as Kit (the mysterious man from Cash’s past), who will do anything — no matter how cold-blooded — to collect the multi-million dollar ransom to pay off his own debts as a drug dealer; his cohort Gus who follows Kit’s deadly orders no matter what; and an even more terrifying person named Mr. Chen, a Hong Kong drug lord who casually cuts off someone’s ear early in the book to put fear into the people working for him.
Although the plot is extremely twisty and chock full of surprises, Out of the Past is actually a very quick read. I finished it in one sitting with the pages just flying by as author Weissbourd told this story. That may be because of Burt Weissbourd’s own background as a screenwriter and producer of feature films as well as an author. This book almost reads like a screenplay at times, racing along from one dramatic scene to another as the reader happily gets carried along for the ride. According to Weissbourd’s biography, he managed his own film company for nearly a decade before turning to crime fiction books — which makes me think I’d love to check out some of his films.
As for Out of the Past, if you’re looking for some thrills and entertainment and fast-moving action, you can’t go wrong with this book.
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