Review
Widower Jake Woods is a family man who cops out of being a police officer to become a professor in a peaceful New England University. During the summer vacation a friend tells him her handsome teenage son has disappeared. Hes been missing for a month and shes heard nothing. The police have dismissed the youth as a run-away. Cut off from the usual channels of support, she begs Jake to help. Jake leaves academia behind and enters the aberrant world of a sophisticated, intelligent abductor. In doing so he places his own children in jeopardy. Later, in New York he meets single parent Lydia Johanssen, distraught after her teenager sons disappearance. Robbie, like the other young victims, is good-looking and athletic and has recently received a free copy of Limbo through the mail. A violent computer game, Limbo is set in post-apocalypse Manhattan where the last surviving teenagers in the city battle Ghoulo himself for their survival. The killer plays this deadly game with his young prey and no longer has the capacity to separate the imaginary from the real. This eerily up-to-date thriller creates suspense and terror without the use of gratuitous violence. The author builds layers of tension to a dramatic climax and just when the reader has begun to relax she throws in an action-packed d?nouement. Jake Woods is a well-drawn character of some depth. A thoroughly good man, hes the touchstone of morality in a world where competition creates monsters and compassion rescues and heals. (Kirkus UK)
