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pgchuis's review
4.0
3.5 * rounded up.
Sarah and her husband Mark are hosting a dinner party when a house further up the street explodes, killing the female occupant and an unknown male, but sparing a four year old girl, Dinah. For reasons I did not really understand, Sarah becomes obsessed with finding Dinah, who mysteriously disappears from the local hospital. Sarah employs a private detective, Joe, convinced that one of her dinner guests, Gerard, was responsible for the explosion.
I enjoyed this novel overall; the bigger picture involving covert government experiments/operations was logical and convincing and I liked the characters of Gerard, Joe and Zoe. I also enjoyed the mere existence of a character named Wigwam. The prologue section was excellent, especially in the light of what is revealed later, and I appreciated the fact that Michael and Thomas were no saints.
However, it felt over-long. Sarah's interest in Dinah was insufficiently motivated and Sarah kept making intuitive leaps in logic that were beyond me; while some of these admittedly turned out to be wrong, a surprising number of them were correct. While this was handy for the plot, it was frustrating to read about. The trip with Joe to the orphanage was a section that could have been cut completely. The body count was also exhaustingly high.
I didn't really warm to Sarah; her backstory had an enormous gap between her recovery from the fall and the now of the story, which made it difficult to imagine what her marriage to Mark had been like. Unless I missed it, we never even found out what her lost career had been. I gather there are further novels in this series featuring Sarah and Zoe; hopefully more Zoe than Sarah!
Sarah and her husband Mark are hosting a dinner party when a house further up the street explodes, killing the female occupant and an unknown male, but sparing a four year old girl, Dinah. For reasons I did not really understand, Sarah becomes obsessed with finding Dinah, who mysteriously disappears from the local hospital. Sarah employs a private detective, Joe, convinced that one of her dinner guests, Gerard, was responsible for the explosion.
I enjoyed this novel overall; the bigger picture involving covert government experiments/operations was logical and convincing and I liked the characters of Gerard, Joe and Zoe. I also enjoyed the mere existence of a character named Wigwam. The prologue section was excellent, especially in the light of what is revealed later, and I appreciated the fact that Michael and Thomas were no saints.
However, it felt over-long. Sarah's interest in Dinah was insufficiently motivated and Sarah kept making intuitive leaps in logic that were beyond me; while some of these admittedly turned out to be wrong, a surprising number of them were correct. While this was handy for the plot, it was frustrating to read about. The trip with Joe to the orphanage was a section that could have been cut completely. The body count was also exhaustingly high.
I didn't really warm to Sarah; her backstory had an enormous gap between her recovery from the fall and the now of the story, which made it difficult to imagine what her marriage to Mark had been like. Unless I missed it, we never even found out what her lost career had been. I gather there are further novels in this series featuring Sarah and Zoe; hopefully more Zoe than Sarah!
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