Review: Good quick read on a nasty subject
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 04 21, 2012
This is an interesting long novella in a series of books by Australian author P D Martin about an FBI profiler, Sophie Anderson. Martin writes well in short sentence thriller style that makes it a page turner. As it is a short book she really doesn't have much time to fully develop the characters, except Sophie Anderson who features in 5 of her earlier books.Warning - this book is about a paedophile who is a serial kidnapper and murderer. Many from Australia, especially from Queensland, may find this disturbing because of the similarities to the Daniel Morecombe kidnapping and recent discovery of his remains in a forest in the Sunshine Coast hinterland.Sophie grew up in Australia and has always been haunted by the kidnapping and killing of her elder brother when she was 8 years old. Several other boys from 8 to 14 were also abducted and killed in similar circumstances at around that time. This trauma was the trigger for her career in law enforcement, first with the Victorian Police and then as a profiler with the FBI in LA (she has dual citizenship from her Father).When Sophie hears that the body of another young boy has been found in similar circumstances more than 20 years after the loss of her brother she immediately fears that the killer is active again. She drops everything and  takes the first plane home to get involved in the investigation.Most of this book is set in Australia with quite detailed descriptions of different parts of Melbourne and rural Victoria. Her description of the arrivals hall at Melbourne airport at 7 am when 14 hour flights arrive from the US and Europe is only too familiar to Aussie travellers and families.Coming Home was written as an interactive eBook - an interesting project where each week the author posted a chapter plus multiple choice questions on what should happen in the next chapter! Readers then voted so they could affect the plot of the book. I always remember the old saying that "A camel is a horse designed by a Committe".  In this case the interactivity was sufficiently productive that it produced a horse with only a slight semblance of a hump (the very quick ending that really needed more attention and detail).I would add more of P D Martin's books in the Sophie Anderson series to my wish list but the prices set by her publisher, Macmillan, are currently outside my normal budget.