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A review by ncrabb
The Shadow Tracer by Meg Gardiner
1.0
Sarah Keller knows all about hunting deadbeats or skip tracers. She has done it for years. She knows all the mistakes people make when they try to fake their death or go off the grid because they can’t pay their bills or whatever. She hunts such people down, and she’s good at finding them. But she understands the idea of hunting down the deliberately lost for another reason. Five years before the book began, Sarah escaped a burning house wherein lie her sister, dying not from the flames, but from a knife wound inflicted by someone else. Sarah escapes into the snowy night once she’s sure she can do nothing to help her sister. In her arms is her sister’s baby, Zoe.
So on a day when Zoe’s bus is involved in an accident that put the little girl in the hospital, physicians are startled to find that Zoe has been microchipped like a dog. Who would chip their child, and what’s on the chip that is so important?
Sarah realizes that she must now again enter the murky world of those who are running from things they can’t or won’t face. Because she’s good at it, she knows what she has to do.
What she’s running from is a ruthless polygamist sect. Sect leaders want Zoe back, because Sarah’s sister was briefly married to a sect member who broke free. It’s bad enough that he got out; but the leadership was infuriated by the fact that the little girl could not be one of theirs.
Sounds like a great thriller plot, right? Not so much for me. So much of it seemed forced and contrived and hard to believe. I just couldn’t buy Sarah’s surprise over the fact that the child was chipped. Are you serious? You’ve played with that kid almost from birth, bathed it, examined every part of it at various times for bumps and bruises, and you are freaked by the existence of a microchip? Sorry, folks, I’m not buying it. Other things happen here that are just too coincidental. The descriptions of the ruthlessness of these polygamist clans is pretty accurate, but the book left me mostly in a state of yawn-and-shrug.
So on a day when Zoe’s bus is involved in an accident that put the little girl in the hospital, physicians are startled to find that Zoe has been microchipped like a dog. Who would chip their child, and what’s on the chip that is so important?
Sarah realizes that she must now again enter the murky world of those who are running from things they can’t or won’t face. Because she’s good at it, she knows what she has to do.
What she’s running from is a ruthless polygamist sect. Sect leaders want Zoe back, because Sarah’s sister was briefly married to a sect member who broke free. It’s bad enough that he got out; but the leadership was infuriated by the fact that the little girl could not be one of theirs.
Sounds like a great thriller plot, right? Not so much for me. So much of it seemed forced and contrived and hard to believe. I just couldn’t buy Sarah’s surprise over the fact that the child was chipped. Are you serious? You’ve played with that kid almost from birth, bathed it, examined every part of it at various times for bumps and bruises, and you are freaked by the existence of a microchip? Sorry, folks, I’m not buying it. Other things happen here that are just too coincidental. The descriptions of the ruthlessness of these polygamist clans is pretty accurate, but the book left me mostly in a state of yawn-and-shrug.