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Xs
by Louise Gaylord
Little Moose Press, January 2005
267 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0972022740


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Allie Armington gets a phone call from her sister begging for $20,000 to be transferred into her accounts immediately. Allie makes the funds transfer, but hops on a plane to find out why her sister -- a supermodel with at least a million dollars of her own money -- would need such a hefty loan.

Upon her arrival in New York, Allie's sister informs her that she needed the money for plastic surgery and, oh, by the way, I can't rouse my roommate. Of course, the roommate is lying dead in her room, having been murdered and left with a single X carved into her breast.

This is the do or die moment for this book. Unfortunately, it chooses the latter. My biggest quibble is the hurtling pace. That was the first chapter. It takes ten more for the story to catch its breath and start to make some sense. This book needs some Valium and a psychotherapist in order to decide what it wants to be when it grows up.

I never quite knew what the focus of the story was supposed to be. Was it the serial killer carving Xs into the breasts of murdered prostitutes? Tom Cruise's EYES WIDE SHUT with the Castle and sex club? Is it about pimping, drug running with the Colombians, a blue blood mastermind overseeing the entire operation, a love story? Allie herself being hired as an 'Independent Consultant' at the NYPD to help solve the case? Or should that be cases?

In the end, it seems the story is about Allie's involvement in solving the case, which ties together at the end rather tritely, with a happily ever after for everyone involved. But while I rolled my eyes a bit at the whole 'Independent Agent with the NYPD /undercover as her sister the supermodel to crack the sex club at the Castle', there was a much larger transgression that killed it for me. Allie has possession of the one piece of evidence the NYPD are looking for. She stashes it in a safety deposit box and doesn't tell them she has it. Brilliant!

Reviewed by J. T. Ellison, February 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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