Run the Risk [Hardcover]

Scott Frost (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 29, 2004

A detective faces a horrifying choice between love and duty in this hair-raising debut.

Reminiscent of the best in today's suspense-from Jeffery Deaver's roller-coaster twists to James Patterson's cinematic pacing-Run the Risk introduces a blazing new talent in Scott Frost. As one of the writers behind Twin Peaks, he knows something about creating eerie and atmospheric tension. In this brilliant novel, he gives us a heroine who faces a challenge no one can ever be completely prepared for and a story as urgently and viscerally told as any in recent memory.

Los Angeles homicide detective Alex Delillo works a case that chills her from the start: one with too much ambiguity and far too many surprises. None of the evidence-and yet all of it-seems relevant. A small-time shopkeeper is shot to death. Then a rare, untraceable explosive ignites in a bungalow, hurling the front door across the yard. Finally, a teenaged girl goes missing, her car window smashed, her keys still in the ignition. Even before they tell her, Detective Delillo knows that this girl is her daughter.

Delillo tracks her quarry on a trail of escalating terror toward a fiery showdown that will test her wisdom, her will, and her every skill.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Pasadena bomb squad detective Dylan Harrison describes the man who's just blown up Lt. Alex Delillo's partner: "He's very skilled, very dangerous, and he enjoys his work." It's an apt, if understated, description, as Frost proves in this chilling debut novel about a serial-killer bomber who plans to demonstrate his incendiary powers on live TV during the annual Pasadena Rose Parade. Alex is a single mom whose feisty teenage daughter, Lacy, is captured by the bomber early on and used as bait to lead partners Alex and Harrison from one gruesome killing to the next. Alex sees herself as a failure as a mother, a fact she bemoans too often, and Harrison bears the burden of a murdered wife whose killer has never been caught, giving the two plenty of tragic backstory to engage reader sympathy. Frost's screenwriting roots (Twin Peaks; The X-Files) provide a solid background as he expertly shows rather than tells how the brainy bomber outwits his pursuers. All too often, savvy mystery readers guess what's going on way too early, but that won't happen here. The bomber is not only ahead of the police, he's just as far ahead of the reader. This, the first in a series, is a jaw-dropper that will leave readers clamoring for more.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Though he has published a couple of novels--The List of Seven (1994); The Six Messiahs (1995)--Frost is probably better known as the cowriter of the cult TV show Twin Peaks. In this thriller, he introduces a series that has a good chance to bring him much wider recognition. Lieutenant Alex Delillo has mastered many challenges on her way to the top of Pasadena's homicide division. But the detective feels like a failure in her other job, as single mother to her teenage daughter, Lacy. Within hours of the story's start, Delillo's professional and personal lives come together in a horrifying way when Lacy reveals her ambitions as an ecoterrorist, a man is shot in a break-in, a bomb hospitalizes Delillo's partner--and it appears that the events may all be related. When Lacy goes missing, an emotionally unraveling Delillo stays on the job, wondering whether she'll get a second chance to make things right with her daughter. Frost has created a puzzle with razor-sharp edges, and as the stakes grow, he keeps putting new pieces on the table. The prose is sometimes overdone (the editor should have imposed a one-simile-per-page maximum), but Run the Risk was written for people who like their books frantic and frightening, and by those measures, it delivers the goods. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Putnam Adult (December 29, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0399152482
• ISBN-13: 978-0399152481
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,194,392 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Everything is sweetened by risk.' Alexander Smith, December 20, 2010

By 

michael a. draper (Guilford, CT) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Run the Risk (Hardcover)

Lt. Alex Delillo, of the L.A. police department homicide squad, is investigating the killing of an owner of a local Los Angeles florist. She and her partner arrive at the home of one of the florist shop's employees, to question him. However, the door is rigged with explosives. Alex's partner is hospitalized but is expected to recover.

Just prior to the report of the murder, Alex's teenage daughter, Lacy, created a near riot at a beauty pagent when she removed two cyllinders from beneath her gown and informed the audience that they were poisonioning the planet just for a parade.

Believing that the cyllinders contained poison, the crowd panicked. Alex and other police calmed the drown and Lacy admitted that the cyllinders only contained insecticide. Alex is furious and wonders how her daughter has changed so quickly from the daughter she knew six months ago, who was most comfortable in jeans and T-shirts.

With Alex's partner injured, she begins working with Detective Dylon Harrison who was in the bomb squad. Maybe it's a needed quality to have in the unit he's in but Harrison has a calming influence on Alex, and, as we will later see, he also has this beneficial quality with victims.

Soon after a body is found in a remote area and identification shows him to be a member of the Mexican army. Los Angeles officials speculate that he may have brought bomb making material to the area.

Lacy goes missing and Alex and Harrison search the home of a part time employee at the florist. Here, they find a man strapped to a chair with bombs set to explode. Harrison disarms the bomb and the man admits that Lacy has been kidnapped by the man who set the explosives.

All of the exciting action is described realistically and the author, Scott Frost, draws the reader into the investigation and we become deeply concerned with the killer's plan to set off the explosives and Lt. Dilillo's attempt to stop him and save her daughter.

Readers will enjoy this thrilling book which was nominated for an Edgar Award.

3 1/2 stars moved up to 4 based on sympathetic characters, dealing with environmental issues and parent teenage child relationships.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very promising and suspenseful debut thriller, June 5, 2007

By 

Bookphile (USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Run the Risk (Paperback)

A gripping, fantastic debut from the former X-Files and Twin Peaks script writer. This book is everything a suspense novel ought to be. The characters are wonderful, vivid, and realistic and the mystery is taut and suspenseful and leaves the reader with some serious moral questions at its conclusion. I give this one high, high praise and look forward to reading the author's next novel.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars More like an Action Movie than a Crime Novel, August 6, 2006

By 

Thriller Lover (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Run the Risk (Paperback)

This novel was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery/Crime novel of 2005, so I thought I would give it a shot. I was somewhat disappointed with it.

Los Angeles homicide detective Alex Delillo's daughter is kidnapped by a serial killer who likes to murder people with explosive devices. The novel basically deals with Delillo's race against time to save her daughter and catch the mad killer.

This book is fast-paced and decently written, but at the expense of character development. In many ways, this book resembles a non-stop action movie. The characters literally run from one implausable action scene (often involving a ticking bomb and an explosion) to another. The book never slows down and allows us to get to know these people. Many of the characters therefore end up rather sketchy and bland.

I also found the daughter character in this novel to be highly annoying, which is unfortunate since we are supposed to fear for her life. There are also many loose ends in RUN THE RISK that are not wrapped up in the ending.

Overall, I give this book a very mild recommendation. I would only recommend this novel to people looking for a good action read.