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TAKE THE BAIT
by S. W. Hubbard
Pocket Books, April 2003
325 pages
$5.99
ISBN: 0743466535


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Jack Harvey has asked his daughter, Janelle, to run an emergency errand and pick up some gas. When she doesn't return home within a reasonable time frame, he begins to panic. As it turns out, he has reason to be alarmed. The gas can is found behind some bushes, with no trace of Janelle. It doesn't seem likely that she has run away, as she had no extra cash and had turned down a ride from a neighbor who saw no signs that Janelle was distressed. Has she been kidnapped? That seems the most probable scenario, especially when a ransom note (albeit a strange one) is received a few days later. But, of course, if she has been abducted, that may mean that she has also been murdered.

Frank Bennett is the police chief who is conducting the investigation together with his somewhat incompetent deputy, Earl. Frank is haunted by the fact that he mishandled the investigation of the murder of a young child earlier in his career, which led to him leaving Kansas City and moving to the Adirondack town of Trout Run. The fact that most of the people in the town are second guessing how he is handling this investigation doesn't help matters.

There are a lot of strange things going on, and it's hard to figure out exactly what is important and relevant to Janelle's disappearance. Various animals are being slaughtered in gruesome ways. Before Janelle went missing, she had been working on a paper on utopian religious communities and had shown an interest in the local Bruderhof community. And then there's her creepy cousin Tommy who seems to know something that he is not telling.

Hubbard did a nice job in the writing of TAKE THE BAIT, which is the first book in a projected series. The setting was well delineated, and the plot had enough twists to it to keep the reader engaged. However, I felt that she tried too hard to fool the reader, and the ending was rather improbable and wasn't very satisfying to me. I felt that the reader did not have the ability to determine "who done it" based on what they knew from the earlier narrative.

I didn't think the police procedural aspects of the book were well handled at all. Bennett frequently lost control of the various interviews he was conducting in the investigation. It just didn't seem plausible to me that someone he was questioning could just walk away whenever they felt like it, and that happened over and over again.

In spite of that, Hubbard shows potential. The character of Frank Bennett was well drawn and had just enough quirks to make him interesting, if not particularly likeable.

Reviewed by Maddy Van Hertbruggen, September 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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