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SACRIFICE
by S. J. Bolton
St Martin's Minotaur, May 2008
384 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0312381131


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

SJ Bolton, in this debut novel, managed to do something few thriller writers can do. She kept me hooked almost through to the end. I'm not a big thriller fan - I don't like the breakneck pacing, I don't really enjoy the 'but wait, there's more' nature of more and more surprises and I tend to find many plots in books like this one, a medical thriller, to be pretty implausible. The author's talent kept me reading, even when I saw some clues early on and wondered at their lack of subtlety.

Tora Hamilton has moved with her husband to the rather remote Shetland Islands. Tora is a consulting surgeon, specializing in obstetrics. She and Duncan have been married five years. The move requires her to adjust to a lot of new things, new people, new ways of thinking. As the book begins, Tora is burying a beloved horse. I found this beginning to be a bit disturbing - it's illegal to bury a horse, even on your own land, and Tora knows this and goes and does it anyway. This speaks well for her emotions but it's a tough start for me to meet someone who's just asking to get in trouble. But things become much more problematic when, in the act, she comes across the mutilated body of a woman.

It's quickly complicated when examination of the dead woman proves that her heart was removed. She also very recently gave birth and has some runes carved into her body. It's all pretty creepy, but I kept reading. The story moves well, as we follow Tora who insists that there's more to this act (how can there not be?) and doesn't understand various responses like "let's just move on, shall we?"

While Tora and most of the characters in SACRIFICE are well drawn and dimensional, including Dana the cop, some of the bad guys seem pretty obviously evil. It's almost as if the author decided she didn't have to work on these guys too much since they were clearly bad, and so their nastiness is evident from the git-go. Easy to guess who the bad guys are. Tora's husband Duncan simply is a cipher to me.She loves him, but there's not much happening there. And at one point, he tells her, "I love you" and she notes that he doesn't say that much anymore. Come on, they've only been married five years. He's already stopped saying "I love you"? That's pretty sad.

I found that as the book went on though, my problems with it grew. There were a few too many cliff-hangers at the ends of chapters, something I associate with, well, to be honest, Carolyn Keene and Nancy Drew. When things seem to be solved, there are still many pages left in the book so you now at least a couple more twists are coming and I didn't really appreciate that. They were necessary to wrap things up, yes, to tie together the varying threads regarding where babies were disappearing to, why the body was buried where it was, and cases of mistaken identity, but it seemed a little much after a while. Finally, about thirty pages from the end of the book, in the last major confrontation, one of the bad guys said something so grotesque, told Tora something that made my skin crawl so much that I almost stopped there. It's too much of a spoiler to explain here, but I found the point that Bolton was trying to make came a little too late.

Years ago, I began saying 'I am not the audience for which this book was intended' as a nice way to say, essentially, 'good book, just not for me'. While I do think Bolton needs to strengthen some of the things she does - I just couldn't buy the stuff about hypnosis, for example - she knows how to intrigue you and pull you into a tale. The Shetland setting is well described, and many of the situations work. But there are readers out there for whom this book will be far more successful.

Reviewed by Andi Shechter, April 2008

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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