Aubrey Nye Hamilton Reviews: Closing Time: A Michael Gannon Thriller by Michael Ledwidge

  

Michael Ledwidge is a New York author who wrote 14 books with James Patterson, most of them about New York City detective Michael Bennett. Beginning in 2020, he has written a thriller series about Michael Gannon, a former Navy SEAL, who inadvertently attracts the attention of formidable international groups who prefer to wield their power from the shadows.

The fifth book Closing Time (Hanover Square, 2025) will be released in early December, just in time for holiday gift giving. It starts off innocuously, as so many thrillers do. Gannon is in Key West, recuperating from his last adventure and watching his son pitch in minor league baseball games. He’s connected with a new love Colleen and they seem to be settling into a long-term arrangement. All in all, everything is good. Then Colleen gets a call about her father in New York, sudden illness, she has to go. Gannon accompanies her to the airport and then misses the ferry back to his place. He decides to look up an old buddy who is running a bar in the area and meets John Hayden, an amiable but worried-looking Australian who offers personal security work to Gannon.

Gannon is focused on his son’s burgeoning professional baseball career and turns the job down but the two share a couple of beers. After they leave the bar, Hayden enters a convenience store while Gannon continues down the street. When he hears gunfire and screams behind him, he realizes the trouble Hayden was expecting has found him and returns to help, thus launching himself into a maelstrom of elite killers, Albanian gangsters, a years-old crime, and a quantum computing chip being sought by criminals from all over the world.

I am a huge fan of thrillers that start with the protagonist minding his own business and suddenly stumbling into a situation not of his making. Gannon is an engaging protagonist, not the usual loner that so often appears in thrillers. He is devoted to his son and delights in the success that his son has achieved. Gannon tends to find ways to appropriate vehicles that do not belong to him when he’s in crisis, leading to some exciting car chase scenes.

Publishers Weekly calls the book “riveting” and readers on Goodreads, a notoriously tough audience, have given the book 4.5 stars. For fans of thrillers with breakneck pacing and international overtones.

 

·         Publisher: ‎Hanover Square Press

·         Publication date: ‎December 2, 2025

·         Language: ‎English

·         Print length: ‎368 pages

·         ISBN-10: ‎1335090525

·         ISBN-13: ‎978-1335090522

 

Amazon Associate Purchase Link: https://amzn.to/47WfT3M

 

Aubrey Nye Hamilton ©2025 

Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It projects by day and reads mysteries at night.