Blind Spot - Softcover

Barrow, Adam

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451191870 ISBN 13: 9780451191878

Publisher: Signet, 1998

Synopsis

When Marshall Quinn discovers the terrible secret that lies behind his three-year-old son's kidnapping, he realizes just how far he will go to retrieve him--far enough so that there is no turning back. Reprint.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

A distraught academic gets repeated stiff jolts of reality when he tries to invade the earthy milieu of factoryhands while searching for his abducted son: an effective child-at-risk thriller from the pseudonymous Barrow (Flawless, 1995). On a summer Sunday outing with his parents at Chicago's Adler Planetarium, three-year-old Jeff Quinn suddenly disappears. While mother Lori retreats into a near-catatonic state, father Marshall (a sociology professor at a suburban college) decides that the police aren't doing enough and takes matters into his own hands. As he blankets the metropolitan area with fliers and photos, it becomes clear that Jeff has been kidnapped on the orders of Odell DeCruz (a.k.a. Dingo), a small-time hustler who deals drugs and stolen goods to the working stiffs at Cicero's Norse Aluminum Plant through a low-life middleman, and who sells young children to anxious couples who ask no questions about the children's origins. Dale and Norma Buckley, a kindly blue-collar couple who lost a beloved young daughter to leukemia, pay $20,000 to ``adopt'' the missing lad they call Davie. Against the odds, Marshall's despairing efforts ultimately produce results, leading him to the Norse plant where Dale is employed. Predictably, his initial attempts to break the closed ranks of this hellish facility's cliquish laborers not only earn him repeated rebuffs and a savage beating but also bring an enraged Dingo back into the game. Bloody but unbowed, Marsh perseveres. With a little help from an unlikely friend he made when canvassing neighborhood bars, the tormented dad gets past the mill's main gate during the company's annual Open House. Once inside, he's able to instigate the violent and, in two cases, deadly confrontations that eventually reunite him with his son. A solid, hard-edged tale whose hero is a cultured but ordinary man obliged by circumstance to pit himself against dark, inhuman forces he's ill-equipped to understand. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly

The traumatic event at the center of this wrenching novel about obsession and denial happens almost casually. Chicago-area professor Marshall Quinn dozes off in a planetarium; when he wakes up, his three-year-old son, Jeff, has disappeared from his side. As his wife sinks into near-catatonic despair and the police poke about apathetically, Quinn undertakes his own search. He drives around with a picture of Jeff in his car window until a woman in another car recognizes the image. She knows the boy as Davie, the newly adopted son of the Buckleys, a working-class family who lost a daughter to leukemia. As the two stricken families converge, Barrow shows how both derive their strength from the same capacity to believe in spite of the evidence. With a superb ear for dialogue, Barrow illumines the different social worlds of his characters. The main plot line is subverted by a subplot involving a small-time hoodlum and some shady goings-on at the factory, leading to the novel's violent conclusion, but Barrow maintains a haunting sense of foreboding throughout. More a multiple character study than a standard thriller, this novel transmits a memorable message about the imminence of tragedy and the fragility of family.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Signet
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0451191870
• ISBN 13: 9780451191878
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 416