Stolen
When John Bodine’s wife, Ruby, is diagnosed with cancer and their medical insurance won’t cover the drug she needs to save her life, John does what you or I probably wouldn’t do. He steals someone else’s identity and files a fraudulent claim with another insurance company. This isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds. Palmer establishes that John operates an online computer game and that he sifts through his subscriber files to find a suitable identity to borrow for a while. But he doesn’t count on the unwitting identity donor finding out, tracking him down, and threatening to kill people unless John plays along with his sick, twisted game, in which John is required to do increasingly illegal things. Someone like Gregg Hurwitz or Linwood Barclay would have hit this one out of the park, but as it stands, the book is more like a ground-rule double—solid contact but not quite enough oomph to reach the fence. Helping hold it back is John’s plan to extricate his wife from one of his tormenter’s games, which, frankly, is so “oh give me a break!” implausible that it almost deserves to fail miserably. There is one pretty nifty plot twist about three-quarters of the way into the book, but by then we’re starting to grow tired of John and Ruby and their plight—they are committing major insurance fraud, after all—and by the tormenter’s increasingly unbelievable cat-and-mouse game. Definitely weaker than the author’s excellent debut, Delirious (2011), and about on par with its weaker follow-up, Helpless (2012). --David Pitt