Scott R Smith

ON THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE is a moral essay written by Seneca the Younger, a Roman Stoic philosopher, to his father-in-law Paulinus.★ Seneca brings up many Stoic principles on the nature of time, namely that men waste much of it in meaningless...

“Six years ago, you voted to send troops into Afghanistan. One of those soldiers was my son, who never made it back. Now, I'm here to ask you, was it worth it?”The gathering was supposed to have been a perfunctory media exercise on retiring Senator...

She'll be home for Christmas… even if she has to steal a ship to get there!Rowan has missed out on the last three big family holidays, and she's determined not to miss another. Holiday travel is always a mess, and even worse when she needs to get from...

Working in law enforcement imparts certain things in a man. The smell of gunpowder in the air. The sight of blood spatter at a crime scene.And the amount of trouble a woman is in by the pitch of her scream.Six weeks prior, on the heels of the most...

Police Detective Reed Mattox, just three months removed from the death of his partner, has turned invisibility into an art form.Switching to the K-9 unit, taking over the graveyard shift, moving to a farmhouse miles outside of Columbus, his every move...

In our line of work, there is no such thing as being a victim of success. There is just success.We can’t stop what we’re doing for fear of emboldening someone any more than we can stop evil men like him from existing. What we can do is stop them from...

“I know you and I have been through some things,” Reed whispered. “Some crazy, crazy stuff. But we have never - and will never - work a case as important as this one.”Eighteen months ago, Detective Reed Mattox didn’t just lose his partner, the woman...

For a moment, she looked as if she had turned to stone. Any slight twitches of her facial muscles ceased. Even her chest stopped rising and falling as she took in air.Everything went completely still, her eyes glazing as she stared down at the mug in...

Detective Roese looked up, lank hair hanging across her face. Blood staining her bare hands and forearms, she pressed down on the sucking chest wound, fighting to prevent another tally on the list of the recently deceased.“You can’t go out there. Best...

Six months have passed since the first murder investigation Detective Reed Mattox and his K-9 partner worked together, finding them in the throes of a steamy Midwestern summer.Working in The Bottoms, a notorious neighborhood on the west side of...

“Any kid with a social media account can call themselves an influencer.”Seventeen shots fired. Four victims.One K-9 detective team.Barely a year before, Le Fontainebleau opened to little fanfare in downtown Columbus. A lifetime passion project of an...

What do you do when somebody targets one of your own?Alone on the couch one night, Reed and his partner are both summoned to the hospital to find two of their colleagues have been viciously attacked, left for dead on the side of the road with very...

“Six quarts is more than necessary for something like that,” Reed said. “It’s not just overkill...”Letting his voice trail off, he blinked several times, bringing himself back into the moment with the realization that it was a statement.Of what, he...

Less than a week before Christmas, Columbus Detective Reed Mattox and his K-9 partner receive a call from dispatch.The body of a young woman has been found floating in the Olentangy River, her teeth forcibly removed, her fingerprints obliterated, any...

Saying nothing in return, Reed listened as the phone cut out, the forest returning to relative silence around them.His hands still cupping the underside of his partner’s face, he tilted his own down to match it, feeling the damp warmth of her fur...

I don’t even know if the call is real. All I know is there is some girl on the line saying her name is Della Snow and that she is trapped inside a box right now.It started as a quiet night, a much needed reprieve for the overworked team of Detective...

“Do you remember Halloweens when you were a kid? Every year from about the age of five until you stopped trick-or-treating, the same thing.“Ghost? Hobo? Even Superman? You wouldn’t think of anything else. Always, you had to be a policeman.”Roughly a...

“The reason we don’t have an ID on the victim yet is the same reason why I reached out to you guys,” Mahoney said. “Our victim is a young Amish girl. Late teens, early twenties at the most.”A month ago, the farmhouse shared by Detective Reed Mattox...