Perfect Nightmare
John Saul
Ballantine, Sep 2005, $25.95, 352 pp.
ISBN: 0345467310

Attorney Steve Marshall is exhausted from his daily commute from his home in Camden Green, Long Island to his firm in Manhattan so he and his wife agree to relocate to the Big Apple. While Kara seeks a brownstone for them to live in, their teenage daughter Lindsay objects as she expects to be named the high school head cheerleader; besides why would she leave suburbia and her friends for the dirty city.

A psychopath recently burned down the home of Patrick Shields, a Marshall neighbour, killing his wife and two daughters. This maniac targets Lindsay next using a realtor open house to enter the Marshall home on two occasions for initial reconnaissance and finally the abduction of the teen. Stunned Steve buries himself in his work and frantic Kara tries to recruit her neighbors and the media to help her find her missing daughter while police sergeant Andrew Grant assumes she is another run away.

The storyline explodes early into a tense thriller, but in spite of several homicides, once the audience meets up front and personal the psychopath he seems tame especially dealing with his teenage female prisoners; his threats towards Lindsay appear ineffectual and empty even as he murders strangers. Still John Saul provides an interesting tale because of the reactions of Lindsay's parents. Her father buries himself in the sands of work while her lioness mother recruits an army to search for her cub.

Harriet Klausner