Amazon.com Review
The inventive and audacious Andrew Klavan never covers the same ground twice, and his latest psychological thriller is about as far as you can get from his previous bestsellers,
True Crime and
The Uncanny.
What all his books have in common is a growing assurance as you turn the first few pages that you're in good, honorable hands--that the author won't trick you shamelessly or go off on some tedious tangent. So, without losing a beat, a book that begins with a horrible plane explosion that rains down fire over a Massachusetts village can shift seamlessly into a jazz musician's hunt for his lost love and an executive hit man's search for a little girl.
When that plane crashes over the small coastal town of Hunnicut (in a scene probably better not read during or just before a flight of your own), 5-year-old Amanda Dodson--"a roundish little mixed-race girl with a quiet, thoughtful manner"--escapes from her babysitter's burning house and wanders into the woods. That's where her young mother, Carol, who works as a cocktail waitress (and does occasional sexual favors for customers), finds her after an agonizing search. With Amanda is one of the plane's passengers, apparently brought back to life by the girl's formidable healing abilities. "Now they'll come after her!" Carol Dodson cries, before fleeing with the child to New York City.
In Manhattan, she has a brief encounter with a grieving saxophone genius named Lonnie Blake. Captivated by her resemblance to his late wife, Blake tries to find Carol again, but he is not the only one hunting down Carol and Amanda. Others want to capture the little girl to exploit her amazing healing powers for profit.
In lesser hands, these ingredients might add up to nothing more than a shameless potboiler, but Klavan has powers of his own--a magic touch that humanizes even the smallest characters and makes them a part of our own world. --Dick Adler
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
1999 may be Klavan's breakout year: the film version of his novel True Crime, starring Clint Eastwood, was a hit, and Morrow is backing his immensely exciting new novel with a major promo campaign. Any breakout will be past due. Admirers of Klavan thrillers acknowledged (Don't Say a Word, etc.) and pseudonymous (as Keith Peterson, The Scarred Man, etc.) know that this author at his best bows to no one for whiplash plotting and page-whirling suspense. He's at his best here. The novel opens full-tilt, with a rain of flesh and "liquid fire" on a small town in Massachusetts. Into the ground-level conflagration caused by the plane explosion walks a little girl. Her mother, Carol Dodson, chases after her and finds her in the arms of a man staggering through the fire, who hands the girl to Carol. "Oh God," Carol says in a moment of clarity whose significance is revealed only later, "now they'll come after her." And a team of villains does, with shocking fierceness, alerted to Amanda's location by the incident and headed by one Edmund Winter, a killer as stone-cold as his name and dispatched by a multinational corporation with a lethalAif a bit too incredibleAinterest in both little Amanda and the man at the crash site. Fighting to save the girl are several equally desperate characters, including her mother, now on the run, willing to do anything, including selling her body, for her daughter; Lonnie Blake, a soul-blasted jazz musician looking for a reason to live; and an embittered lit professor stricken with cancer. Related in trim, athletic prose, the novel unfolds around New England and New York City as an extended, twisty chase, breathtaking but seriously deepened by its fallible heroes' varied struggles for redemption. The ending is a kick in the solar plexus but feels just right: this is a thriller with smarts equal to its ultra-slick style. $300,000 ad/promo; author tour; rights sold in the U.K., France, Italy, Germany, Holland and Japan.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
