David Benz, The Flip Side of Forever

David Benz, The Flip Side of Forever - In 1961, Hamilton" Ham" Sprigs leaves his wife Martha in Texas, taking his daughter, sixteen-year-old Julie with him and heads to the northwest because he rationalizes that his spouse is violent and could harm their child. Interestingly, Julie realizes that she is not Ham's biological daughter as he was in the European Theater of Operations during World War I when she was conceived.

Ham and Julie settle in Port Terminus, Oregon, where he gains work as a security guard on the graveyard shift of a local paper mill while she goes to school. Ham meets Julie's Spanish teacher Angela Vierge and soon they are seeing each other. However, an incident occurs that forces Ham and Julie to leave the Pacific for Texas although he knows they can never go home anymore.

This is an intriguing historical thriller with a dark twist that hooks the audience from the moment that Julie informs her father that she is very good at math, did the calculations and they fail to add up right so she knows that Ham did not sire her. Readers will see a caring stepfather protecting his beloved child from a potentially abusive biological mother. The tale never slows down from that mathematical summing until the final confrontation. Along the trek fans will know the darker side of Ham as David Benz writes a deep, shadowy, suspense, dysfunctional family, drama thriller.

Five Star, May 2005, $25.95, 248 pp.

ISBN: 1594142866

Harriet Klausner