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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Literate Psychological Thriller by a Master of the Genre,
By
This review is from: Kiss Daddy Goodbye (Hardcover)
This is a very well-written suspense story. Altman establishes the tone by providing details of atmosphere and mood that, like parentheses to the main dread, subtly seem to enclose and entrap the main character:"She stared at the merciless neon of nocturnal commercialism." "Silences. Emily thought of an aquarium for some reason, of the restless silences of fish slipping through water. So much motion and no noise." "You never smell anything in your dreams..." She thought of her husband's par amour as "a figure who, already forming in her mind, shimmered like heat haze rising from concrete..." There's no blood spatter along the way here, although there is a shocking image overarching the action. This story is also incidentally interesting in that it illustrates how much social expectations have changed in just a few decades. The book was written in 1980, not that long ago. So the reader might be taken aback by the extent to which many of the characters enjoy smoking without concern over consequences. It's also amazing to read how Emily, the main character, unquestioningly allows the strangers who randomly showed up for her babysitting co-op to watch over her children. No background checks, no probing interviews. Even more surprising is how Emily continues to use even the woman who drank herself into a drunken stupor the first time she babysat. Such trust, such laissez faire seems incomprehensible today. Yet it probably accurately reflects the attitudes in many suburbs until relatively recently. All the characters are well-limned. There's an especially nerve-racking, poignant subplot involving a nearly helpless blind man caught in his daughter's cruelty. But who is his daughter? Which one? "Kiss Daddy" is a classically constructed web with a limited number of strands of tension, a limited number of suspects. So it's fairly easy to keep track of everyone. You can concentrate on trying to penetrate the mystery of which of the babysitters, if any, is the psychopath. As a final fillip, the "Daddy" of the title may not be the Daddy you presume - at least, not entirely. I think this book will inspire you to search out other works by this author. In addition to writing as Thomas Altman, he has also written suspense under his "real" name, Campbell Black, and under other pseudonyms such as Campbell Armstrong. One of the most frightening movies ever produced, the original "Black Christmas," is also based on an Altman/Black thriller.
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