‘Gone’ by Lisa Gardner

Published by Orion February 2006.
ISBN 0-75287-306-7

Pierce Quincy is an ex-FBI profiler whose professional interest in catching criminals becomes personal when the victim in his latest case - a roadside kidnapping by an unknown assailant - turns out to be his estranged wife and business partner, Rainie. Perhaps the UNSUB (‘unknown subject’) is related to Quincy’s and Rainie’s last case, a particularly brutal mother-and-daughter murder. But then Dougie, a troubled young arsonist whom Rainie is representing in a possible abuse case, is kidnapped as well. Now the list of suspects - and the kidnapper’s demands - really start to escalate...

Gone is a breathless ‘woman in jeopardy’ thriller, in which the investigators’ adversaries include Oregon’s torrential rain, which washes away evidence from Rainie’s abandoned car and pretty much everything else. The seedy underbelly of Oregon is vividly portrayed, and there are telling details such as Oregon being known as the state of ‘cheese, trees and ocean breeze’. The momentum never slackens, with the long-suffering FBI, Oregon State Police and other investigators being given a non-stop runaround by a kidnapper whose motivation seems to be less about money than power and glory. Poor Rainie and Dougie are tied up, starved, beaten and nearly drowned, and there are car chases and mayhem aplenty.

The race against time is reinforced by a clipped writing style that often dispenses with definite articles (’Kid was young, farming stock, but trying hard’), and time-stamps such as ‘Tuesday, 12:24am PST’ at the start of every single section. The time-stamps soon feel redundant, and sometimes the writing feels as rushed as the investigators. Three times characters ‘blink their eyes’ (as opposed to blinking their ears, perhaps?) and I lost count of the times that someone ‘arched a brow’.

Also, it was frustrating that Quincy gives a compelling profile of the kidnapper, only for everyone (himself included) to continue overlooking the one person whose behaviour is a textbook match. I was left with the feeling that if the characters hadn’t been rushing around so much, they would have twigged earlier on who the bad guy was. But I guess that keeping the good guys run off their feet and in a state of agitated confusion was both the kidnapper’s and Lisa Gardner’s intention.

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Julian Maynard-Smith
Lisa started by writing romances under the name Alicia Scott but switched to suspense novels with The Perfect Husband in 1998. Gone is her 8^th crime novel.

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