: Final Target
Author: Iris Johansen
I was expecting a “mere” action thriller, and instead I got a fascinating character study blended with action. The story is about the President’s seven-year-old daughter who has retreated inside her mind since a kidnapping attempt. She has spoken or responded to anyone. The President has hired a radical psychiatrist who has experience with such cases: her own sister was incomunicado for six years following the car accident that killed their parents. The other main character is a mysterious man named Michael. He’s an international rogue, making his living in various underhanded ways, but he showed up at the President’s mansion in France to stop the kidnapping, and the daughter responds to him, he being the only one who can calm her violent nightmares. To help save the daughter from permanently being lost, the trio “kidnap” the President’s daughter. What follows is a wild chase through Europe as Michael has to evade several parties seeking his head, plus evade the CIA and Secret Service and European police that are trying to find them. Oh yeah, and there’s the original kidnapper who now wants Michael dead. It’s a race against time. There’s much more, but that’s the gist of the plot. Then there’s one key Stephen King-like twist: the sister of the psychiatrist has a psychic connection with the little girl. She can go into the girl’s mind. Very cool and unusual in a spy-type thriller. I really liked the characters and the way they interacted, and the whole concept of the little girl lost in her nightmares was excellent. A good read. There are a few criticisms. The beginning of the book introduces too many characters too quickly, which is confusing, and in places the novel gets distracted and slows a bit from the main plot. I also thought the aspect of the “Wind Dancer” (a priceless statue) was odd: Iris seemed to assume we knew the history of the statue and writes about it a vague, mysterious manner that implies a lot but doesn’t explain much about it (it took me a while to realize it was an important character and by then it was too late). At the back of the book she reveals she wrote three previous books about the Wind Dancer, so that explains some of that (she obviously doesn’t want to retread old stuff), but she should have handled that aspect of the story better (the way it is in this novel I would have preferred to have left it out entirely rather than leave it in the incomplete way). Still, those are minor gripes. It’s an excellent book and I’ll definitely be looking for more novels by Iris Johansen.
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