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STALKING MOON
by David Cole
Avon, January 2002
295 pages
$6.50
ISBN: 0380819708


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

She could be called a woman of many identities. Talented at creating a new persona when she needs to, Laura Winslow (now Laura Cabeza) is widely recognized as the person that you want to have working for you if you're trying to track down money on the Internet. As the book opens, Laura is in much demand. The job she's doing in Vegas is cast aside for one that has a lot more potential-the tracking down of women who have come paid to come from Albania to purported freedom in Mexico. The reality is that no such freedom exists. The women are transported in cargo containers into the US and then sold into sexual slavery. At the same time, Laura gains another client who is trying to track down some embezzled funds.

The premise of the book starts out to be a good one. Laura is expected to navigate chat rooms and Instant Messaging services to follow the trail. This represents a challenge to her, in that the technology for IM doesn't leave an identity trail on the hosting server. She's actually rather worried that she won't be able to do it, because it is an extremely difficult task. How she does do it feels like a cheat. And the details around how all this stuff works were too technical for the average reader.

What Laura finds that she really wants to do is find her ex-husband so that she can reestablish a relationship with her daughter, who she has not seen for almost 20 years. However, almost immediately, an old friend by the name of Meg shows up and gets another narrative thread going. Meg is teetering on the brink of mental illness. She establishes safe houses for women and is off her meds so that she can experience first hand the depression that many of the women she helps face. This is indeed a flawed approach, and Meg teeters within a manic depressive state for most of the book.

Confused? I was too as I read the book. The narrative was not presented in a linear fashion, and I struggled to find my way and understand what was going on. I found myself hopelessly lost, both in terms of the characters and the plot. I felt that the author was trying in some way to present a message about the women who were smuggled, but it never really was developed. As the main thread became the journey of Laura in search of her daughter, the more interesting threads of the smuggled women, the technological challenges and the money chasing were dealt with almost perfunctorily.

I was disappointed in the book. A large part of the book was spent in setting up her situation, and there were too many back stories and threads to make for a cohesive read. Cole does a good job in creating some misleading red herrings and depicting some harrowing action scenes, but overall, this book did not work for me.

Reviewed by Maddy Van Hertbruggen, March 2002

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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