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I'm sitting here shaking my head in amazement at a very rare event in my reading life. I just read an ending that blew me away. After reading far too many weak resolutions, it was totally awesome to read one that really worked! All my conclusions about The Dead Room that had been formed up until the last chapter were turned around. The character that I thought was disposed of too conveniently? I was wrong. The person that I found to be inconsistent? I was wrong. The motivations of some of the more likable characters? Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Thank you, Robert Ellis, for breaking the mold and developing an ending that really worked. But perhaps you'd like to know something about what happens in the book. A young woman who is enamored of her own body has been teasing the mailman, allowing an "accidental" glimpse here, a fleeting glance there. When she is found brutally murdered, he is the only suspect, as the forensic evidence is incontrovertible-his finger and lip prints are all over her body, her blood all over his clothing. When Oscar Holmes confesses, it's time to lock him in jail and throw away the key. For some reason, a very well-connected lawyer wants to defend him against the charge and assigns one of the young attorneys on his staff to the case, a real estate lawyer by the name of Teddy Mack. Teddy has consciously decided not to pursue a career in criminal law as the result of a horrible incident in his family's past but has to follow the big man's directive or risk his future in the practice. There are other victims who have suffered horrible deaths, so it appears that Oscar is a serial killer of the worst sort. Against all odds, Teddy decides that Oscar is innocent. To put it mildly, everyone thinks that he is out of his mind, including the defendant, who had a black-out incident during the murder but who does believe that he did it. Teddy is helped in his case by a renegade legal expert by the name of Nash who specializes in taking old cases and having them investigated by his students. He has a high success rate at having the cases retried and finding the original target innocent. Teddy also works with the assistant district attorney, Carolyn Powell, who is less willing to believe but who is at least open to talking about the incongruities that Teddy uncovers. She is very loyal to her boss, a real no-holds-barred type who loves to embarrass and humiliate his opponents. What Ellis does wonderfully well is to engross the reader in the narrative and make it impossible to put down. There are scenes which will make you angry, others that will leave you shaking your head, but you will want to finish the book even if it seems at times to have conflicting information. What I initially thought was the resolution of the book, and an unsatisfactory one at that, was not really a resolution at all. Ellis uses a device where he fast forwards 6 years after the culminating events, and it is only then that we see the true horror of the situation. The book will leave you shaking your head in amazement that you didn't see the truth all along. Although there were a few areas that were not well done, notably an explicit sex scene, the book held up to this reviewer's microscope. Warning: there are a few graphic scenes that may be difficult for more sensitive readers.
Reviewed by Maddy Van Hertbruggen, April 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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