Dead Time

After the shocking developments in Dry Ice, Colorado psychologist Alan Gregory is struggling to deal with his newly adopted son and repair his shaky, though generally improving, marriage. But then Alan's ex-wife, Meridith, reappears, seeking help she feels only Alan can give. Suddenly Alan is pulled into a mystery that reaches back years to a camping trip at the Grand Canyon involving Meridith's fiance and five friends whose lives were changed forever when a young woman mysteriously vanished from the Canyon floor.
Enlisting the help of friend and detective Sam Purdy, Alan finds himself pitted against new demons and unseen enemies as he tries to uncover the connection between the unexplained disappearance at the Grand Canyon and Meredith's missing surrogate. The clock is ticking, and as Alan's and Sam's investigations take them from New York City to Los Angeles to the cavernous reaches of the Canyon itself, Alan unearths a series of secrets and deceptions that someone wishes to keep buried at all costs.

White constructs a deeply layered, character-driven meditation on “dead times,” as in times of mourning, times of personal paralysis in the face of crisis or disappointment, times of waiting for someone else to make the next move, or, even, bring a fetus to term. Yet, for all of clinical psychologist White’s ruminations, this novel chugs along on a number of suspenseful fronts. The dead time of shock and grief just after the discovery of a mutual friend’s sudden death in a terrorist bombing attack in Israel brings Boulder psychotherapist Alan Gregory (in his fifteenth appearance as White’s series hero) and ex-wife Meredith together at the friend’s memorial. The discomfort of their reunion is communicated by having the point of view switch back and forth between the two; while this technique gives an intriguing double perspective to the action, readers will notice that White doesn’t bother to give Alan and Meredith separate rhythms in the way they express their thoughts. Meredith wants Alan to help her find someone who has gone missing, the surrogate mother of her child. The surrogate’s disappearance connects to a long-ago disappearance of another girl on the floor of the Grand Canyon. Beautifully orchestrated in plot but very long-winded: the tension could have been tightened dramatically by cutting about 100 pages. --Connie Fletcher