Review: With Family Like Sarah's, Who Needs Enemies?
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 30, 2013
In a world full of colorful private investigators, "Keeper" Marconi is a classic who risks life and limb to uncover the truth.When a young mother from an affluent family incurs a serious head injury that renders her comatose and, later, unable to remember the occurrences that led up to her fateful fall, her father pushes a $40 million law suit against the wealthy restaurateur who may have been responsible for the accident. All he needs is proof.The David's aren't your typical family. They're loaded, powerful, and well-positioned to avoid life's consequences. Junior is a spoiled playboy with a penchant for drugs and violent sex. Senior is a businessman with an agenda. The two, combined, are shady at best, so when Junior's fiance is hurt, they're willing to stop at nothing to save their name and family fortune. They didn't see Keeper Marconi coming.Along with his sidekick, a former inmate named "Blood", Marconi blurs the lines of private investigating and refuses to heed warning that the David family isn't one to be messed with. "Blood" who hails from the wrong side of Albany, NY, a place Zandri writes with the authenticity of a local, is a nice addition to the cast of characters. This being my first time reading Zandri, an author somewhat out of my usual horror, paranormal, and urban fantasy genres, "Blood" provided a familiar element of the flawed ex-villain turned good guy.The book moves along at a nice pace and while I'm not sure the 50 Shades angle really did anything for the plot other than lend pop culture notoriety (Junior could've been any garden variety pervert), it had me wondering what exactly DID happen to the somewhat one-dimensional Sarah.Introduced in the beginning as a love-sick tart and reluctant participant in Junior's sex games, Sarah is the part of this book that fell flat for me. The book, written from Marconi's point-of-view, feels like his story, with full emotional detachment from the victim. That might well be a staple of the genre and only takes away from the story, for me, in hindsight. Sarah is a single mother with her heart turning her back home, to a loving ex-husband and a normal life. A lot could've been done there that was left in the periphery.Overall, a good read with enough intrigue to keep you turning the pages. What did happen to Sarah Levy, and will she live to see justice served? Sometimes our enemies are the people closest to us.