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One night, Paris Gibson, the mysterious host of a night-time call-in radio show in Austin, receives a chilling telephone call from a listener who threatens to kill his girlfriend within seventy-two hours. He says Paris has forced him to take this extreme step because she advised his girlfriend to leave him on an earlier program. Paris immediately notifies the police of the threat and offers to assist in their investigation. When she arrives at police headquarters, she encounters Dean Malloy, her late husband's best friend, who, it turns out, is the police psychologist assigned to the case. It's clear from the beginning that there's more to their relationship than either of them is willing to disclose, and a good part of the book is given to exploring their relationship. Let's just say that as Malloy and Paris are thrown together over the course of the investigation, long-buried passions ignite. At the same time, Janey Kemp, the daughter of a local judge and member of an on-line sex club goes missing. The judge refuses to believe that the cases might be related until evidence mounts that Janey was not only a member of the internet sex club, but one of its most sought-after participants. Brown offers us a great variety of possible suspects. The station manager, the custodian, Malloy's teen-aged son, a dentist with a porno addiction, a cop, and almost every male character in the story are taken through the book's version of a perp walk before it's over. The story is fast paced and the ending is chilling, if a bit cliché, but I couldn't find a sympathetic, believable character in entire book. Though Brown weaves the strands of her story masterfully, I couldn't bring myself to care about what happened to any of them. It's as though she hauled out paper dolls and walked them through her scenes. Still, if you're a fan of Sandra Brown's, you might like this book. She executed her formula well enough to keep me going until the end. But if you're looking for something to engage your emotions or cast light on the issues of pornography and sexual abuse, you should definitely look elsewhere. I listened to the book on tape and Victor Slezak did a good job narrating this 10 cassette, 13.5 hour story. This is a good quality production job that doesn't distract you with technical problems, and the story is good enough keep you awake on a long drive home.
Reviewed by Carroll Johnson, October 2003
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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