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The story begins quite briskly with a young blonde New York law student being stalked and eventually brutally raped and left for dead. She survives, but is emotionally devastated and has a complete mental breakdown. Twelve years later, we find our heroine in Miami. She has dyed her hair and changed her name and buries herself in her work as a prosecuting attorney. There is a serial killer on the loose; his victims are all young blondes and the murders are beyond brutal. A man is arrested and when the prosecutor meets him in court for the first time she is stunned to realize that he is the man who raped her. I found this pretty predictable, although there is a nice moral dilemma involving the prosecutor and the defense attorney. The writing style is pretty good, it moves along. My advance copy contained quite a few spelling errors which was irritating; I hope the services of a human proofreader were obtained before the final version hit the stores. I found some other lapses less forgivable. One demonstration of the rapist/murderer's supposed diabolical intelligence is that he leaves not one molecule of his DNA anywhere at the scenes of the crimes. Yet in the rape we watch there is no indication of how he could possibly do this -- he wears a latex mask and gloves, but the rest of his body is, as far as we are told, uncovered and the procedure is prolonged over hours. Not one body hair, not one drop of semen, not one flake of skin, in repeated assaults? Pfft. The other objection is even more central. Pretty much the mainspring of the story is our heroine's state of extreme mental stress. We are given plenty of information about the original assault, enough to make her devastation entirely credible. A major theme throughout the story is, is she going to break down or not? We see her wavering, we see the enormous stress she is under. Yes, she is basically a strong person, but the pressure is severe; even a little more could be too much. The trouble is, the more believable this is, the less believable becomes the obligatory romantic interest. Perhaps a more skilled writer could have convinced me that this character in these circumstances would get involved with a guy, but I didn't buy it here. Similarly, the formula arc of the story requires a horrifying betrayal-and-assault scene and, presented with a character already balanced on a knife's edge, I found the resolution of this to be simply absurd. A final objection to this story is the enormously irritating intrusion of product placement. Oh my goodness, the characters don't smoke cigarettes, they smoke Marlboros; the heroine doesn't fill her pet's dish with crunchies, it's Purina Cat Chow; it goes on and on. Apparently, Hoffman has a whiz of an agent, she's already got a movie deal for this book, and I can only assume the product placement was part of The Strategy, but it became way too obvious early on and annoyed the heck out of me.
Reviewed by Diana Sandberg, February 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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