Rating: 4 stars
Jack Davis returns, no longer with the FBI following his daughter’s fatal drug overdose after she and a rogue FBI agent became fugitives from a drug ring bust that Jack helped take down. However, the FBI thinks Jack helped his daughter with her crime and there was still the minor issue of the $5 million in drug money that is still missing—which the FBI thinks Jack is hiding.
Not to mention Jack has a severe movement disorder that causes his body to contort uncontrollably and making it difficult to do his job. Add to that, the appearance of his landlady’s daughter and an ex-sheriff fresh out of prison for stealing diamonds from a crime scene, who has taken possession of the house he lives in, and Jack has his hands full.
Billionaire Milo Harper runs the Harper Institute, which does research on the brain as it relates to dreaming, while trying to outrun the mounting lawsuits and Alzheimer’s that will soon consume him. When the research volunteers begin dying in the exact way they have been dreaming, Milo looks to Jack for help. First day on the job, an old colleague calls Jack to the scene of yet another volunteer victim and Jack gets the shock of his life; the dead man is holding an empty envelope addressed to Jack from his now-deceased daughter. A letter Jack never received. Not only does Jack need to find a way to end the killer’s rampage, but also delay his own arrest as the FBI increase their efforts to prove that not only does Jack have the letter and the money, but he’s also the killer.
When the story opens in 1959, with a sheriff arriving at the scene of a brutal double homicide; the only survivor is the couples’ little girl. When the plot jumps to current day 2009, you can’t imagine what one thing has to do with the other; however, Joel Goldman does a fantastic job of building a mystery that keeps you guessing the whole way through and then effortlessly brings it full circle. All of Goldman’s characters are very human – good people who have had bad things happen.
Jack Davis is a stand-out character, who despite all the hard-knocks he has taken in life, manages to hold on to his sanity and keep it all in perspective. Jack’s sense of humor about the debilitating tic disorder that renders him helpless at times, keeps the pity at bay and the reader cheering him on.
-------------------------------
Paperback: 384 pages
Publisher: Pinnacle (April 7, 2009)
ISBN-13: 978-0786020409