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FORESTS OF THE NIGHT
by James W. Hall
St Martin's Minotaur, January 2005
352 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0312271808


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Charlotte and Parker Monroe are kind of an odd couple. Charlotte is a police officer and Parker is a high-profile defense attorney. His specialty is getting some of the low-lifes off on technicalities. Yet they love and respect each other. The couple met when Parker saved Charlotte from being convicted as an accessory to murder.

However, all is not rosy in the upscale Coral Gables home they share. Their 16-year-old daughter Gracey is a schizophrenic who hears voices when she is off her meds. Gracey is addicted to old movies and hears the voices of actresses such as Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck. Sometimes they actually do give her good advice,

Charlotte comes home one evening to find a young Native American man talking to Parker in his study. Charlotte's specialty is reading people's faces, and she is good at remembering them also. She realizes that Jacob is on the most wanted list and goes into her bedroom to call the FBI. Gracey helps Jacob escape and suddenly the safe world they all inhabited has turned to ashes. Parker and the rest of the family have just learned that Jacob is Parker's son.

The author has abandoned his south Florida locales for the most part in this book. While the story starts in Miami, the action quickly transfers to North Carolina's mountains. Parker's family owned a summer camp in the midst of the Cherokee lands and Parker spent each summer until he was 16 in the mountains. When his father was murdered and their home destroyed by fire, his mother Diana took Parker to live in Miami. And it was to Miami that Parker returned after law school and where he built his lucrative law practice.

The sins of the past come back to haunt the characters who populate this book. Whether Native American or not, there were many wrongs perpetrated on both sides in the past, but mostly towards the Cherokees. The author takes the reader back to events that occurred over 150 years earlier to set the premise for the story.

I was slow to warm up to the Monroe family at first, and while I never found the parents to be sympathetic characters, I was interested in finding out the resolution. I do think that I would prefer Mr Hall to keep his Florida location in future novels.

Reviewed by Lorraine Gelly, March 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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