From Publishers Weekly
Twenty years ago Caroline Webb's five-year-old daughter Hayley was kidnapped and murdered, her body decapitated and burned. The case was never solved. Caroline's second marriage, to a compassionate older man, and the birth of two children, Gregg, now 15, and Melinda, 8, have helped to ease her nightmares. This inventive and forceful psychological thriller traces the bizarre, terrifying events that convince Caroline that a new horror is emerging--Hayley has come back not only to seek revenge on her killer, but to murder her half-sister Melinda as well. She hears Hayley's voice calling to her in a shop; she sees "Help me Mommy" written in blood on the bathroom mirror. Caroline's husband seems only mildly concerned and the police are skeptical, but when three people with ties to the original kidnapping are murdered, one by one, detective Tom Jerome reopens the old case and finds that it was badly mishandled. First novelist Thompson controls a vigorous cast of increasingly puzzled and frightened characters, while astute detective work and even a hint of the occult keep the suspense level consistently high.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
This spooky first novel is a tightly woven mixture of suspense, action, and mystery. Caroline's six-year-old daughter Hayley was kidnapped 19 years ago. Her beheaded, burned body was found, but her murderer was never caught. Now a serial killer is on the loose, brutally murdering people who were in some way connected with the child. Bouquets of black silk orchids are found near the bodies with cards scrawled in a childish hand, " Black for remembrance ." Has Hayley returned from the grave for ghostly revenge? Or is a human agent responsible for the grisly killings? False clues sprinkled throughout keep the reader guessing (usually incorrectly), but the solution makes perfect sense. Sure to be compared to Mary Higgins Clark's best-seller Where Are the Children? ( LJ 3/1/75), this nearly flawless suspense novel has more than enough merit to stand on its own.
- Rebecca House Stankowski, Purdue Univ. Calu met, Hammond, Ind.Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
