Sallie Bissell, Call the Devil by His Oldest Name

Call the Devil by His Oldest Name

Sallie Bissell

Dell, March 2004, $6.99, 370 pp.

ISBN 0553584944

Assistant district attorney Mary Crow is an excellent prosecutor and genuinely nice person but she has one small problem. She keeps seeing a dead man and it unnerves her so much that she is seeing a psychiatrist who believes she's suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The police and the FBI believe that Stump Logan, known conspirator against the U.S. government and the suspect in the murders of Mary's parents died in the explosion at Russell Cove.

Nobody knows that Logan is still alive and Mary did see him three times when he was looking for an opportunity to kill her. He has now come up with a scheme to force Mary to come to him by kidnapping her goddaughter Lily. At first the police don't take the abduction seriously, thinking it is a domestic dispute. As Mary begins receiving e-mails of Lily, she realizes Stump lives and decides to use herself as bait, a risky move that might get her killed.

Sallie Bissell has written as extremely exciting crime thriller about an obsession taken to extremes and the tragic results that happen because of that compulsion. The protagonist comes across as a very sympathetic person, leading to readers rooting for her to triumph over the adversary she knows about and the one who has stayed in the shadows waiting for the right time to strike. CALL THE DEVIL BY HIS OLDEST NAME is a pulse pounding, adrenaline-pumping novel that the audience will remember long after finishing the last page.

Harriet Klausner