By Sandra Brown
Grand Central
It began so peacefully. The scene is tranquil, domestic, happy. A young widow, Honor Gillette, is frosting cupcakes under the watchful eyes of her four-year-old daughter, Emily. The words finally penetrate “that innate mom-screen that filtered out unimportant chatter” - Emily is saying there’s a sick man in their backyard.
There is, indeed. Honor asks Emily to retrieve her phone from the bedroom and goes outside, but as she draws closer the obviously wounded man acts so quickly, so professionally that she doesn’t even have time to recoil before he has her neck in a hold and a gun pointed toward her heart.
Life change in a nano second - from baking cupcakes to being held hostage in her own home, forced to save herself and most of all, Emily. The man is Lee Coburn, the prime suspect in the massacre of seven people the previous night. Obviously, he is capable of anything, a soulless creature. He promises Honor he will not harm them if she does exactly as he says. She has no choice - her home is isolated, bordering a Louisiana bayou. Honor has remained there because it is the home she and her late policeman husband, Eddie, had shared.
Coburn begins to systematically dismantle her house, searching for something he claims Eddie has hidden. Despite Honor’s denials of knowing what he is talking about he literally reduces the home to a shambles, while hinting that Eddie’s death was not an accident, that he was killed for what he knew. Further, he claims that what he is looking for is of such great value that the lives of Honor and Emily are in danger.
In a shocking turn of events Honor comes to believe Coburn is telling the truth and they go on the run in search of the secret Eddie held and the mastermind behind the mass killings, barely staying inches ahead of the law, those who were her trusted friends.
Always an ace at penning romantic suspense Sandra Drown has outdone herself with Lethal. From page 3 it’s exciting, tightly plotted reading and ever mounting suspense peopled by finely drawn characters who are not who they appear to be.
This is stay-up-all-night reading!
- Gail Cooke
No comments:
Post a Comment