Descent

Read Where It All Started

Steve McAllister’s debut novel Descent is a heart pounding thriller in the style of John Grisham and James Patterson. Written when he was only twenty-three, the story reflects Steve’s life at the time, centering around a part time youth pastor/college student in North Carolina who is struggling with his faith. The main character, Kyle Kelly, is called back to his hometown of Sarasota, Florida when his sister Beth is attacked and left for dead.

It is up to Kyle and two of his childhood friends to find out what Beth saw and to keep her attacker from coming back to finish the job. Filled with action, humor, and heart, Descent is an engaging story with memorable characters that will be revisited in Steve’s next book, Maelstrom.

Ebook coming soon!

An Excerpt from Descent

The warm water lapped against her ankles as she strode along the beach with her companion, but the storm raging in her mind wouldn’t allow her to notice the soothing tide. Normally, she relished the ease with which the waves caressed the shore. On this particular night, however, her mind was too full of other emotions to even give peace a chance. She had noticed the trembling in her hands earlier and had placed them in her pockets as she hunched her shoulders and walked into the warm breeze.

The beach seemed empty. They had been walking for at least twenty minutes, and hadn’t seen another person in ten. A lone catamaran cast a long shadow across their path. To her left, she could see the glow from the streetlights peeking over the sea oats and even heard the distant cars on the road. As they walked further, the lights dissipated, the road coming to an end. The moon was the only source of light that illuminated their path. The pale, white orb shone dimly in the black sky as the only eye that watched over them.

She had been on this beach a number of times before, though she had rarely walked this far down. There had been unorganized events held by other people in her school. On various occasions, she and her friends had stumbled upon these parties. They were your normal high school weekend gatherings, celebrations of adolescence with a lot of alcohol, some marijuana, and nubile, teenaged bodies pressed together, writhing in the sand like epileptic Siamese twins. After stumbling upon one of these parties for the first time, she and her friends always went looking for more. Only on a handful of other occasions did they find one. More often than not, the police had broken them up before they had even gotten going. Now, the only other things that moved on the beach were her, her companion, and their shadows, faint in the moonlight, faithfully following behind them. There were no kegs to be seen. No drunken teenagers. No couples making love like grunions in the sand. It was just them. And though he was there, she felt utterly alone.

As a nervous reaction to his silence, as she waited for him to stop and say something to end the monotony of their silent procession, she pulled one of her hands out of her pocket and removed the chopsticks that held her strawberry-blond hair in a bun, allowing it to fall to her shoulders. She had the ivory shafts in her hand, longingly rubbing them with her thumb.

Her brother had gotten them for her on a mission trip. They were one of the few things that she truly cherished. She never let him know how much she appreciated them; theirs was not that type of relationship. Since he had decided to follow his father’s footsteps into the ministry, they had little to say to each other.

She always knew the day would come when he, like her father, would be preaching at her about the life she had chosen for herself, and she had no intention of hurrying those conversations along, so she kept her distance from any kind of dialogue with him. But the fact that he had been on the other side of the globe and thought enough of her to get her even the smallest token was enough to show that he genuinely cared. That was all that she needed. That was why she cherished the gift. His words would only speak of his disappointment in her decisions in life; the chopsticks just said that he cared.

He was a good brother. She silently wished that he were here with her now so that she could let him know that. And his company would be much preferred over that of the man who continued to walk in silence beside her. Realizing that it was just an empty wish, she slipped the small shafts into her back pocket. She sneaked a short glance at her companion and held onto hope.

He moved silently beside her, staring ahead at nothing. Out of the corner of her mind’s eye she saw him thinking, but with her natural eyes she saw an unflinching face devoid of emotion. The stale night air made the scene seem even more tense than she had imagined it to be. Finally, her companion stopped, turned, and faced her with a soulless look in his eyes.

Descent will be released as a serialized novel through The McAllister Code blog starting on September 9, 2009. Sign up as a subscriber through our Feed Burner to have Descent and all of The McAllister Code blogs delivered directly to your email account.

Ebook coming soon!