DOUBLE PLAY

Author: Pamela Neri ISBN: 050552645X 9/2005 SUSPENSE Publisher: DORCHESTER/Love Spell

When he met her online, she was a woman living in daily fear of her husband's chilling, systematic abuse. But she had a plan, a place to go, and someone to go with. That was her last message before signing off forever. Elizabeth Harper vanished while hiking alone in Hawaii’s remote Kahana Valley State Park. There’s was no body, no evidence to suggest what happened…until Detective Jack McQuinn discovered she was the same woman he'd counseled online, a beauty whose coolly detached surgeon husband already spoke of her in the past tense. Had Dr. Richard Harper murdered his wife, then set up her disappearance? Or had Elizabeth faked her own death to escape him? Then Dr. Harper’s body was allegedly ID’d at the site of a fatal car crash, the case was closed on his wife’s disappearance, and Jack McQuinn turned in his badge. He’s headed for New Mexico, a search for two people who disappeared into thin air, a woman he'd never forget, and a deadly… DOUBLE PLAY

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

DOUBLE PLAY requires a double shot of espresso in order to get through it. Well, maybe it's not that bad, but it sure isn't a book I devoured in double time. Despite the plot sounding like it will be exciting, it isn't. It's flat and drawn out. Too many pages of filler stuff until you get to another action scene.

The pages are littered with inconsistent craziness. Considering the heroine is supposedly on the run from her "dead" husband, that beats her and wants to kill her, she spends a lot of time out in the open while he stalks her. That a woman with her history has to be talked out of going back to the apartment and city that the wife-beater has already tracked her to, floors me. That she would be so afraid of her husband, yet she suddenly becomes "he-woman" and bossy with the new man in her life, is perplexing. That she would go stay with her family in Florida (they think she is dead) after she knows that her psycho hubby is still alive and after her, especially when she had refused to let her family know she was alive for a year after she left him, is senseless. Doesn't that put them all in danger?! Something she had previously refused to do?

I just don't care for this book. It's not thrilling enough for me, doesn't make a whole of sense, and the hero is rather tepid as well. How many times can he, an ex-cop, not catch the husband?! And the ex...well, besides being described as a likeness for Sub-Zero from the Mortal Combat game, he is a well educated and respected cardiothoracic surgeon that reverts to his less-than-suburban childhood by calling himself, Ricky Boy. Written the way it is, the name is not chilling and just doesn't fit.

With such a plot premise, more could have been done to make DOUBLE PLAY into something. Wish it would have been.

Shannon Johnson