Saturday, July 19, 2008

"Quicksand" by Iris Johansen

I believe Johansen's new novel has set a record as the third fastest 340 page read after the first two in the Harry Potter series. After sampling the first dozen pages yesterday I polished the whole thing off in one sitting today.

The book was so absorbing and so well crafted that I'd get to the end of a chapter, resolve to put it down to do something else, and be too interested in what happened next to put it down. I swear I'm walking around as if my legs won't move now after spending some 8 hours straight at it.

This is an "Eve Duncan Forensic Thriller." Eve Duncan lost her daughter to a serial killer several years before and embarked on a career as a forensic artist partly in an effort to find her own daughter's body and to stop the killer from taking other people's children.

I like the fact that the author delves deeply into the minds of the heroine, her police investigator lover and room mate, Joe Quinn, and the killer himself. I like that the plot is full of action, twists and turns and interesting settings. The scenes take us from rural Atlanta, where Eve and Joe live, to a forest in rural Illinois, to a national forest in Georgia and to the Okefenokee swamp, so there are a variety of richly described settings to take in.

The murders described are horrific, and they are described to some extent from the point of view of the child victims themselves, through the words of a psychic and the words of Eve's dead daughter. In this respect, the book reminds me of "Lovely Bones," but expanded to cover a number of settings and killings.

The plot takes a nice twist at the end and leaves the reader knowing that the next book in this series will contain new and different psychic revelations in the quest to discover how Eve's daughter, Bonnie was killed and where her remains are located. No doubt a new killer suspect will be revealed.

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