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Chevy Stevens has a way of immediately pulling a reader into a story. In the first 20 pages of NEVER KNOWING, we see 33-year-old Sara Gallagher, who has a happy family life, search for and find her birth mother. She's hurt and puzzled though, when the woman, Julia Laroche, doesn't want to speak to Sara. The tension continues as Gallagher hires a private detective, and we learn that Laroche is the only victim of a serial killer to survive – and that the killer is Sara's father. As summer approaches and the Campsite Killer, as he's called, goes on the hunt again, investigating detectives want to use Sara as bait. But will this endanger Sara and her six-year-old daughter, Ally? While the initial story draws us in, Stevens' second book (after the bestselling STILL MISSING) lags in the middle. Sara goes back and forth on how much she wants to help police, arguing with her fiancé. There's a lot of dialogue, but little action. To make matters worse, the story is told by Sara as she relates events to her therapist, a format that's contrived and which only slows down the story. Fortunately, Sara is an interesting enough character to keep us reading. She has anger issues, gets painful migraines when stressed, is obsessive and has been violent on one occasion, hurting an ex-boyfriend. When she learns the identity of her birth father, she wonders whether some sort of bad gene has been passed down to her. Stevens' first book, also about a woman in danger, was a tightly-written, can't-put-down psychological thriller. NEVER KNOWING lacks the emotional pull of that book. Still, it's a good summer read for the beach – just maybe not the campsite. § Lourdes Venard is a newspaper editor in Long Island, N.Y.
Reviewed by Lourdes Venard, June 2011
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