The Timer Game (Grace Descanso, Book 1)

Grace Descanso was going to be a pediatric heart surgeon---she was a brilliant up-and-comer with a bright future in a heartbreaking, innovative field. Then she took two months off to work in a clinic in Guatemala, and something happened there that nearly destroyed her. She won’t talk about why, but she quit medicine and nearly killed herself with drink. Finally, inch by inch, she pulled it all together for her new baby girl. Now, five years later, though she’s sworn off practicing as a doctor, Grace is using her science background as a crime scene tech in San Diego and going to AA meetings, scraping by and living to be a mom to five-year-old Katie. 
     Everything falls apart again when in the middle of processing a crime scene Grace shoots a madman after he’s killed two of her colleagues and after he’s called her by name, in a bizarre kind of warning, about someone he called “the Spikeman.”  A day later, her daughter is kidnapped right out from under her, and instead of a ransom note, the kidnapper sends her on a harrowing twenty-four-hour scavenger hunt, laying out clues and giving out deadlines, leading her carefully, terrifyingly closer to Katie---and to him.
     The Timer Game is a pulse-pounding race-against-time novel of suspense from a talented writer.

Susan Arnout Smith is a third-generation Alaskan whose grandparents homesteaded an island. Winner of the Stanley Drama Award and a playwright at the O’Neill’s National Playwrights Conference, she has also been a recreation director on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, a television anchor in Anchorage, and an essayist for National Public Radio. She has written TV movies for several networks, one of which was a finalist for the USA Pen West award. She lives in southern California with her husband. This is her second novel.