Overall, the book carried me through, I didn't put it down until I was finished. Heck, I didn't even peek at the end like I so often do with books. Some may even call that cheating, but it's a need to know type thing.
My big problem with the book was the whole 'suspension of belief' type thing. Plus it had some serious John Doe undertones and since it was published this year, I have to think that the author had to have been watching John Doe. Why did I feel this way? For starters, you have a guy who gets kidnapped by two old geezers and the typical large dumb guy. Well, the head of this ring is the old lady (hmmm, the first John Doe link). They take this guy off to a distant ranch out in the desert, then they invite a Psychiatrist to 'deprogram' him. They are trying to make him remember his past, but they've got the wrong guy. They really wanted his adopted brother who looks just like him, though they don't know this yet.
So far, this could just seem like an amateurish kidnapping attempt, but they keep alluding to something bigger. Something more organized. The problem with this is the fact that they leave the psychiatrist alone at the remote ranch with the big dumb guy. For one, if they were really a major organization they'd have their own deprogrammer and wouldn't lure someone unknown out to do the job. Second, they wouldn't leave the idiot whom they think will talk too much ALONE for days with the intelligent psychiatrist and the kidnap victim.
So many things just don't add up. And then at the end they have a scene where the plane chases them down and they shoot it down with hand guns. The cops arrive and they can't even find the old geezers that they tied up or the big dumb guy that they shot in the head... After I think all this through I begin to wonder why I read the entire book in one sitting. (I also wonder how an unconscious woman can ride a horse bareback for hours, but hey it's fiction - right?)
This book was the setup novel for the 'Family Secrets' series about the extraordinary five and a group called Medusa. So far, it has a lot of John Doe undertones and a lot of very stupid activities by this Medusa group. How organized can they be?
I've heard a lot of good things about Maggie Shayne's Vampire series - I just hope that it's more 'believable' than this story.
