The Beginning Game

Nicholas ‘Nicky Nick’ Wells truly believes he is a changed man. He is smarter. He is patient. And he is reverential to those in a position of authority. But is it all just a dangerous ruse? Only days after he is released from one of America’s most infamous prisons, Wells—now a martial arts expert—begins to execute his life’s new mission. Befriending a vulnerable woman to suit his needs, he begins to exact retribution against the most unlikely of targets—an elderly man afflicted with crippling terminal diseases. But is his target really a feeble old man? Or is it simply the beginning of a campaign aimed at those he thinks are responsible for the twelve-hundred and seventy-seven days he spent in a prison cell?

In the third and final episode of a saga that began in 2010, R.M. Doyon returns his readers to upstate New York and the fateful Schumacher family. This is where we meet many of the characters that Doyon richly introduced in Upcountry and Thou Torturest Me. They include the family patriarch, Hubie, a Vietnam veteran who doesn’t believe he’ll make it to his seventy-fifth birthday. Rejoining the narrative, too, is his devoted daughter, Joanne, herself the victim of an abusive husband but has now created a happier life. Then there is the bruising county sheriff, Brian Boychuk, with decades-long links to the Schumacher clan, who at last begins to see that seemingly random acts of harassment are not so random after all. And, once again, we are drawn to the lives of a virtuous young man, who was born into an Amish life, and the ‘English’ girl he never stopped loving.

In this gripping, page-turner of a novel, Doyon deftly brings to a conclusion the story of how one American family beset with cruelty, violence and heartbreak can ultimately experience closure and renewal.