The Locker - Ted Nulty

People have too much stuff! When it gets overwhelming, storage lockers are an option. You can put all that stuff that you can’t stand to get rid of in a storage locker, lock the door, and come back for it when you have more room.

But that final step doesn’t always happen. Then what’s in the locker gets forgotten, and often it doesn’t make sense to keep paying the rent and the locker is abandoned and the storage facility auctions off the contents. There is a large turnover in these things. There are websites like https://www.storageauctions.com/ and https://www.storagetreasures.com/ where you can go to seek out options in your area. But you need to be cautious. These anonymous spaces can contain items that you are not expecting—sort of like the tarantula in the bunch of bananas!

Nulty has taken full advantage of this premise in his book, The Locker. It just so happens that a drug cartel is using one of the storage units to stash their cash.The problem occurs when the “abandoned” locker come up for sale, one of the lockers on the abandoned list is mislabeled and the cartel’s locker is auctioned off to Tom and Sheila Stanford who are looking to buy useful items for their church. Needless to say, the cartel is not happy about the loss of their drugs and their money. But Tom and Sheila Standford are not your average citizens. They are both ex-marines and they possess a lot of weapons. They also have a lot of friends. And it just happened that along with a bunch of misprinted t-shirts there was six hundred and forty million dollars in the cartel’s locker and that provides a lot of options.

There are a lot of guns and a lot of violence in this book as the Standfords and their friends and their money take on the bad guys of the cartel. As an ex-marine, Ted Nulty writes from experience. He has a family pedigree of marines and weapons. Part way through the book, I was ready to put it down because of the amount of violence. I’m still not sure why I need to know exactly what brand of gun is being used to shoot somebody. It did remind me of a Lee Child story.

But I like the premise of this book and Nulty fleshes out his characters well—both the bad guys and the good guys. The reader knows that there is going to be a major confrontation because neither side is willing to let things slide. Nulty also sets up the Home Alone scene as Tom (as Kevin in the movie) sets up his traps for the final confrontation. Nulty wrote the movie script for The Locker but production is in limbo.

If you’re fond of shoot-em-up stories with the good guys winning out in the end, this is a book for you. Nulty writes up to seven books at a time, so there is a feast more stories for you to follow up with.