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THE END GAME
by Gerrie Ferris Finger
St Martin's Press, April 2010
304 pages
$24.99
ISBN: 0312611552


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Moriah Dru (owner of Child Trace Inc) and her lover Lieutenant Richard Lake are in bed celebrating their weekend when both get a call. A house in a gentrified section of Atlanta is burning, two bodies are inside, and two foster children are missing. They rush to the scene where they try to find the children, discovering in the process a horrible network designed to steal children and sell them in areas of the world where no one worries about pedophilia. If they do not find the children soon, they will be out of the country.

The crime seems to indicate that the mastermind knows the neighborhood so they interrogate questionable residents. Several more people are murdered and our two detectives use the Web, old-fashioned questioning, and deductive reasoning to follow the kidnappers and attempt to apprehend them and release the children.

One of the problems I found in this book is that the detectives relied too much on hunches and guesses and the reader, at least this one, did not understand where those hunches came from. They led the detectives in unusual directions, which made the book seem less believable. Another reason that I found it hard to suspend my disbelief is that the two heroes wandered off on their own, calling on resources but seemingly nearly independent of any control or direction.

The subject (child abduction) is one that many readers find unpalatable. That should not bother readers because no details are given and the story traces the investigation and does not focus at all on the children. In fact, sometimes it seems that the investigation has a life of its own, independent of the fate of two little girls. But there are no vivid details or violence on screen.

The characters are interesting if not fully realized. The story is told in the first person by Dru (who goes by her last name to almost everybody). She is strong (perhaps a bit headstrong), committed, and brave. We see Lake through her eyes and he is a good cop who occasionally doubts her hunches but follows them anyhow. The other characters are stereotypes - the village idiot, the smooth architect, the evil chief of child protective services, the nosy old lady neighbor, the clever young boy. They all play a role in this story.

The setting is very well done. I could see Cabbageville, the run-down homes and the gentrified ones, the streets with the people milling about searching for the children, the cemetery where they often had picnics, the railroad yards adjacent to the neighborhood so that the whistle of trains punctuate the events.

In the end I really could not get too excited about the solution to the mystery. The villain was evident part-way through, and we knew our heroes would find the girls and rescue them, if not unscathed, then at least alive. The denouement went on much too long as the murderer-kidnapper felt he had to explain himself completely to Dru.

This was the winner of last year's Malice Domestic Competition, the prize for the winner being publication. There have been stronger winners but this has some intriguing features which may lend themselves to an interesting second book in the series.

Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, February 2010

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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