Amazon.com Review
Author John Gilstrap's last thriller, Nathan's Run, was a fast-paced, deftly plotted tour de force about a kid in trouble. In his newest, the author serves up another child-in-danger plot, not quite as scary but touching a more sentimental nerve. Bobby and Susan Martin are still grieving the stillborn son who represented their five-year dream of a family of their own. When a frightened toddler escapes from his kidnappers and plunges into the clearing in the West Virginia mountains where the Martins have pitched their camp, he seems to Susan like the answer to her prayers. And when Bobby shoots the man pursuing the little boy, what seemed at first like a justifiable homicide turns into a nightmare; the pursuer is a cop. Bobby wants to surrender himself and the silent child to the authorities, but after several failed pregnancies, Susan is less willing to give up the boy she almost immediately names Steven, after her dead son. Meanwhile, April, the boy's mother, learns he was taken to satisfy a gambling debt incurred by her ne'er-do-well husband. Gilstrap deftly sets April's search in motion, taking her into a criminal underworld of drugs, extortion, and murder and setting up a heart-tugging situation in which the reader isn't sure whom to root for--the child's real mother, trapped by circumstances, or Susan Martin, who'll do anything to keep him. This explosive thriller ends in a hail of bullets, a climax well worth waiting for after a page-turning read that should earn its author a following of new fans. --Jane Adams