THE FACE

Author: Angela Hunt ISBN: 9780778327271 11/2008 SUSPENSE Publisher: MIRA

Born without a face... Orphaned and severely deformed from her earliest moments Sarah Sims has been kept hidden away in a secret CIA facility—until an unexpected discovery gives her an opportunity to make a life for herself at last. Now Sarah has a ally, a long-lost aunt who has discovered her true identity. Aided by this brave psychologist, twenty-year-old Sarah must find the courage to confront the forces that have confined her for so long. And the strength to be reborn into a world she has never known.

RRAH's THOUGHTS AND PONDERINGS:

Angela Hunt sets her suspense novel, THE FACE, in a former convent on a small island off the coast of Spain where twenty-one year old CIA employee Sarah Sims has lived her entire life. Her father was an undercover CIA agent and her mother died the day after Sarah's birth. She was born with superior intelligence, but an extremely malformed face. After numerous operations, she has a dislike for doctors and a face that is freakishly patchworked and ribbed. A face only a mother could love. Her guardian all these years is a doctor working for the CIA at the hidden island fortress where agents are brought for emergency surgery. All this changes when her aunt Renee finds a file folder in a storage facility that her mother had rented and paid for before her death. Could Renee change everything for Sarah?

Hunt spends the first half of the story setting up the encounter between Sarah and Renee, who works tirelessly for months trying to contact her niece, going to the trouble to gain the right security clearance by applying for a position as a psychologist with the CIA. Renee is not only a brilliant doctor, but persistent, wanting to share her love and life with her only known relative on the planet. Sarah is a computer whiz with mad hacking skills who supports covert ops along with a former agent, Judson, who lost his eyesight and lower legs to the same Spanish drug-making outlaws who killed Sarah's father twenty years earlier. Her guardian, Dr. Mewton, is reluctant to have Renee come at all, but when Renee finally convinces her niece to undergo a face transplant and join the real world, Mewton's jealousy comes out. She'd rather keep Sarah imprisoned with her away from the cruelty of the world. When the bad guys come to this hidden fortress for Sarah, who will be willing to give up her life for the young woman: The only mother she's ever known, or the aunt who's just discovered her existence?

THE FACE is one of the most suspenseful novels I have read, and the action is on a par with Ian Fleming or Dan Brown. There is plenty of high-tech gadgetry and even a romantic twist as Renee falls for (and the love is returned by) the surgeon who arrives for Sarah's transplant. Readers will be touched by Sarah's strength, Renee's courage, and Jud's eternal optimism and faith in humanity.

Susan Barton