Diana Abu-Jaber, Origin

Origin

Diana Abu-Jaber

Norton, Jun 2007, $23.95

ISBN 0393064551

In Syracuse, New York, grieving mother Erin Cogan somehow got past the Wardell Center for Forensic Sciences guards to reach crime lab technician fingerprint examiner Lena Dawson. The obviously upset intruder pleads with Erin to look into her baby's death, officially from sudden infant death syndrome. The distraught mom swears her six-month-old child Matthew did not die from SIDS. While police officer Ed Welmore escorts Lena from the building, Erin looks at the Dawson file, which reads classic SIDS.

Lena prefers cases involving loss, hurt or damaged children, which is probably associated with her own murky, orphaned, early childhood. However, although a loner, Lena follows her intuition, which leads her to take a glance at recent SIDS cases; that in turn sends alarms in her stunned mind when she sees how much an outlier Syracuse has recently become compared to the national average and the city's trends. She begins to wonder if perhaps the near hysterical mother might be right that there is something more humanly sinister than SIDS at work here, something tied back to her own miraculous infant survival when the odds of her living was zero.

Lena makes the tale as she has a ton of psychosis yet needs to know the truth about herself and the sudden spike in SIDS cases. The storyline has plenty of action, but is fully driven by Lena, who refuses to quit on either of her quests although mentally she knows her precarious hold on sanity is slipping. Her tentative romance with a detective and her former spouse's need to keep her safe enhance the look at this unlikely heroine. Besides a deep look at SIDS and somewhat at other causes of infant mortalities (shockingly America ranks 42nd in the world when it comes to infant mortality rate, a worse placement than Cuba), ORIGIN is a strong, well-written, police investigative thriller.

Harriet Klausner