Even Steven
Author John Gilstrap's last thriller,Nathan's Run, was a fast-paced,  deftly plotted tour de force about a kid in trouble. In his newest, the author  serves up another child-in-danger plot, not quite as scary but touching a more  sentimental nerve. Bobby and Susan Martin are still grieving the stillborn son  who represented their five-year dream of a family of their own. When a  frightened toddler escapes from his kidnappers and plunges into the clearing in  the West Virginia mountains where the Martins have pitched their camp, he seems  to Susan like the answer to her prayers. And when Bobby shoots the man pursuing  the little boy, what seemed at first like a justifiable homicide turns into a  nightmare; the pursuer is a cop. Bobby wants to surrender himself and the silent  child to the authorities, but after several failed pregnancies, Susan is less  willing to give up the boy she almost immediately names Steven, after her dead  son. Meanwhile, April, the boy's mother, learns he was taken to satisfy a  gambling debt incurred by her ne'er-do-well husband. Gilstrap deftly sets  April's search in motion, taking her into a criminal underworld of drugs,  extortion, and murder and setting up a heart-tugging situation in which the  reader isn't sure whom to root for--the child's real mother, trapped by  circumstances, or Susan Martin, who'll do anything to keep him. This explosive  thriller ends in a hail of bullets, a climax well worth waiting for after a  page-turning read that should earn its author a following of new fans.--Jane  Adams