Karen Rose Nothing to Fear

Nothing to Fear

Karen Rose

Warner, Aug 2005, $6.50, 528 pp.

ISBN: 0446614483

In Wight's Landing, Maryland, two intruders shoot Paul and overpower Cheryl Rickman. The female invader finds frightened deaf twelve years old Alexander Vaughn hiding under life jackets in a bedroom closet. She tosses Alex and Cheryl in the trunk of their car.

In West Virginia, Bryce calls his sister Sue on her cell phone to ask if she can bail him out of jail in Ocean City, Maryland. Fearing he will talk about the kidnapping of the Vaughn child, she agrees to call their Uncle Earl and Aunt Amy, two losers she plans to kill soon. However, instead of Earl or Amy, James answers. James who she killed rising from the dead tells her he murdered Earl and Amy and is coming for her; when you kill someone make sure their dead. Needing time to pull off the multimillion dollar ransom and related revenge, Sue executes Cheryl and heads to Chicago to hide with Alex at Dana Dupinsky's Hanover House, a safe house her prison cellmate used. At about the same time Alex's parents have reasons not to call law enforcement, so they turn to security expert Ethan Buchanan, Alex's godfather. Soon, everyone will converge in Chicago.

The paragraphs above depict the opening ten percent of an action packed thriller that never slows down until that final High Noon convergence in Chicago. The cast whether they are an innocent frightened young pawn in a family drama, his parents, cold blooded killers, a professional trained in Afghanistan to track people in hiding, or a woman's shelter manager come across as real especially their reactions towards the crisis. NOTHING TO FEAR is a tense chilling suspense that readers will appreciate from start to finish.

Harriet Klausner