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THE BREATHTAKER
by Alice Blanchard
Warner Books, November 2003
416 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0446531391


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Mystery with a large soupcon of suspense added, this story kept me reading past my bedtime. It takes place in a small Oklahoma town, right in the middle of Tornado Alley. The bodies of the three members of a family are found inside their home after a tornado, brutally impaled with pieces of debris.

When the detectives and Police Chief Charlie Grover examine the bodies, however, they find defensive wounds on their hands and arms. An autopsy shows that they were murdered by someone during the tornado. The murderer had pulled a tooth from each victim and inserted a foreign tooth in the socket. Some checking around allows Grover to find another couple also murdered during a tornado.

Charlie narrows his search quite quickly to the storm followers, that group of people who for one reason or another race about during tornado season looking for the worst possible storm and then get as close to it as they can. One of Charlie's aides is a professional student of tornadoes and she takes him on some harrowing trips. When the murderer abducts Charlie's daughter and takes her into a tornado, the suspense becomes white-knuckle.

The characters are reasonably well-delineated. I had a little trouble keeping the three 'bad boys' of the town separate, but that may have been my fault. Charlie was a single father whose wife had died of a brain tumor. His daughter was 16 and at the age when she wasn't sure what she wanted to do. She was attracted to one of the wilder young men in town and Charlie didn't like that one bit. But he was a very busy policeman and really wasn't home enough to know what she was doing. Willa and Rick, the professional storm chasers, are collections of eccentricities bundled together to make reasonably believable characters. The victims are described quite well also so we don't dehumanize them.

The plot was intriguing. The uncovering of the murderer surprised me. The red herrings had done their work quite well in my case. The story moved quite fast and it was certainly competently written.

I learned a great deal about tornadoes and about the predicting of them -- what kind of conditions will create the best chances of tornadic activity -- and I also learned about the people who chase storms, who get their thrills from just missing the terrible power that is wrapped up in even the most minor of tornadoes. This was fascinating information.

If you are tired of serial killers acting out the ways they were mistreated as children, then you probably will not enjoy this book. But if you are looking for a decent suspenseful mystery I think you will find it most interesting.

Reviewed by Sally A. Fellows, December 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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