Wrong Place, Wrong Time
A tense debut action-thriller that hinges on a pair of related kidnappings.At the start of Jacobs’ taut novel, Tsarina “Tsara” Abrams lives  comfortably in the New England suburbs with her husband, David Adelman,  and their two kids. One day, she receives an invitation from her uncle,  businessman Castle Thornlocke, to attend a charity fundraiser at the  palatial Thornlocke estate in Libertyville, N.H. Tsara’s brother Court  has also been invited. Their relationship with their uncle has always  been tense and adversarial, but it seems that Uncle Cass’ new wife,  Alicia, has mellowed him somewhat, and Tsara believes his invitation  might be an attempt to mend fences. She makes the trip to the New  Hampshire mountains, and at first, all seems well—but her first night  under her uncle’s roof, she’s kidnapped by two men and brought to a  remote cabin in the woods. They explain that her uncle is holding one of  the kidnappers’ children hostage (along with half a dozen others’) in  his estate’s wine cellar in order to coerce them into paying outstanding  debts. Her uncle, it seems, is a ruthless power broker, with the  corrupt local police entirely at his disposal, and Tsara’s desperate  kidnappers see no alternative but to threaten him using similar methods.  Jacobs presents the ensuing tense moral and tactical standoff with  smooth skill and intense readability. Her sense of the New Hampshire  landscape is vividly atmospheric (“The sky was azure, wisped with  occasional brushes of clouds, and the trees were rocket bursts of fall  color”), and her characters are refreshingly three-dimensional; by the  end, Jacobs even makes a monstrous villain such as Thornlocke  understandable, if not sympathetic. The novel is fast-paced right from  the end of the first chapter, and the dialogue is crisply believable  throughout. Fans of mystery writers such as Lisa Scottoline and William  Kent Krueger will find much to entertain them here.An intelligent, thought-provoking adventure story and a fine debut.--This text refers to an alternatePaperbackedition.