Gone

Clary Hale thinks she has finally escaped her horrible past and created an idyllic family life until one day her children wake to find their mother gone--kidapped by the psychopath who has been obsessed with her since her youth. 35,000 first printing.

A genuinely frightening, unpredictable plot throbbing with menace and escalating horror, appealing characters thrust into mortal danger, and a chilling portrait of a charismatic serial killer distinguish this outstanding psychological thriller, the pseudonymous Craig's debut. The morning after a homicidal psychopath abducts Clary Hale from her Connecticut home, her three children awake bewildered by her absence. Michael and his sister Teah are teenagers; their brother, Tom, is 4. As military brats (their father was lost commanding a nuclear submarine on a secret mission), they are accustomed to obeying orders, so at first they believe the phone caller who says their mother is also on a secret project and that they are not to tell anyone she is gone. Soon, however, they decide to try to find her, using the one clue they have: the address of their maternal grandparents (whom they have never met). With their not-too-bright cleaning lady as driver, the kids begin a hegira down the East coast that brings them--and their captive mother--ever closer to triggering the obsessed villain's bloodlust. Craig excels in her depiction of a wholesome American family tipped into a horrifying situation. Her control of narrative momentum is unflagging, and her assured prose is levels above the usual standards of the genre. BOMC and QPB selections.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Psychothriller by first-novelist Craig sustained throughout by rich stylization. Craig starts off with a literary bang, introducing her plot as indirectly as Faulkner introduces Popeye's rape of Temple Drake in Sanctuary--and in nearly as high-flown a voice as Faulkner's. Can Craig go the distance at this level? Well, the fine vocalizing never stops, but the plot at last turns on the familiar villainies of the obsessive psychopath we first met in Thomas Harris's Red Dragon. Harris's serial murderer identified with Blake's drawing of Lucifer; Craig's magnetically handsome killer (who kills by the family) is crazed by a tree of rage he believes is growing within him and whose image he's been carving in scar tissue on his body--a fact telegraphed about half-way through the novel. Clarada Hale, a Navy widow with three kids, has been waiting for four years for her MIA submariner husband to return from the dead. Instead, a figure from her past reappears and kidnaps her: Cleve Morrow, a prodigy who loved Clary but murdered her parents when she was 17, was put into a mental institution and there educated himself in criminal law, anatomy, and whatnot. Now, like De Niro in Cape Fear, he's back. The story, though, is told largely through the eyes of Clary's kids--Teah, 16, Michael, 15, and Tommy, a toddler--who find themselves alone in their house one morning. Where's mother? Gone??? They can't believe it and keep house for themselves for nearly a week awaiting her return, get drunk, and reduce the place to a stinking pigsty. Clues arise that get them to drive down the East Coast in search of Mom and toward the fated meeting with Cleve and his prisoner Clary, with an inescapable final chase of the family through the Florida jungle. A debut that should be a big hit and begs for film. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In this fast-paced thriller, novelist Kit Reed ( Catholic Girls , LJ 8/87) has taken on a new pseudonym as well as a new genre. Clary Hale's husband Tom, a navy captain, was lost at sea four years ago. When Clary disappears, her three children--Teah, Mike, and Tommy (aged 16, 15, and four)--believe she's gone on a secret mission to find their father. But as time passes, they realize she's been kidnapped by Cleve Morrow, a charismatic madman from her past. They trail the pair from Connecticut to the jungles of Florida, where a tense cat-and-mouse game is played to the death. Of course, the idea of two teenagers and a child embarking on a cross-country rescue mission is silly, but the author's portrait of Cleve, the seductive psychopath, is so stunning that it's easy to forget the ridiculous premise--and hard to put down the book. Recommended. BOMC and Quality Paperback selections.
- Rebecca House Stankowski, Purdue Univ. Calumet Lib., Hammond, Ind.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.