Review: An okay psychological thriller
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 06 29, 2014
What if: a businessman disappears hours after arriving in San Francisco. Hmmm. That idea might generate any number of interesting storylines and Douglas Wickard turns it into an intense mystery/suspense/ psycho- thriller. Almost.“Before the boy reaches the age of seven, he had already made plans to kill his father.”Alex Kitas, an NBC correspondent, calls his wife, Rhonda, to tell her he has arrived in San Francisco and then he leaves the hotel for a clandestine rendezvous. When Alex fails to call the next morning, but NBC does call, saying Alex missed his interview, Rhonda suspects the worst. She flies to SF, gains admittance to Alex’s hotel room, and holds a press conference pleading for information on her missing husband.Recognizing that over the past years, five other men have disappeared under similar, nefarious circumstances, SFPD detective, Vanessa Sanchez, interviews Rhonda. Rhonda gives Sanchez the first clue of the mystery— the imprint of a telephone number Rhonda finds on a bedside notepad. The police probe is set into motion.I enjoy a psychological thriller and Wickard does an excellent profile of the perpetrator’s motivations, but the author dilutes the story with fluff: dysfunctional marriages, hurt and angry ex-spouses, infidelity, substance abuse, Google map tours of SF, none of which contributes to solving the mystery. Then, you have FBI agents Dan Hammer and Harry Wright. The author portrays Wright as the quintessential FBI criminal profiler but all one gets from him is a lecture on missing person statistics. Dan Hammer? He become a victim of GHB homosexual rape—by the perpetrator? (Which, by the way, Hammer enjoys— a closeted gay?)By the end of the book and with Rhonda’s clues— the telephone number and discovering on Alex’s computer that he engages a sexual masseur— Inspector Vanessa Sanchez does the investigative legwork to solve the murders.There are technical and artistic problems as well: poor sentence construction and unsuitable diction. A critical editor would remedy this and tighten the narrative by limiting the extraneous and non-contributory fluff.The disappointing comments aside, I did enjoy the story. Five stars for the idea, two stars for content, and an overall three star recommendation.