What Comes Next

Starred review from March 26, 2012
Set in a small western Massachusetts college town, bestseller Katzenbach’s impressively powerful and emotional thriller delves into dementia, teenage angst, and Internet voyeurism. After receiving a diagnosis of degenerative dementia, a slow but sure death sentence, Adrian Thomas, a retired professor alone in the world who has “spent much of his academic life studying fear,” decides to go home and shoot himself, but fate intervenes. When Adrian pulls into his driveway, he witnesses a man and a woman in an unmarked van kidnap 16-year-old Jennifer Riggins, who’s running away from home. The couple have seized Jennifer to star in Whatcomesnext.com, a Web site where viewers watch the girl’s torture in real time. Despite his failing mind, Adrian is able to use the psychological insights he gleaned as a professor to hunt for Jennifer. The tense plot smoothly shifts between Adrian, who teams with a skeptical, compassionate detective, and the captive girl. Katzenbach (The Wrong Man) avoids the clichés of dementia, while deftly showing the inner resolve that Adrian and Jennifer each discover in themselves. Agent: Moses Cardona, John Hawkins & Associates.

May 1, 2012
Katzenbach (The Madman's Tale, 2004, etc.) sets an amateur sleuth living on borrowed time to hunt a kidnapped teenager whose time is even shorter in this pulp-ish re-imagining of "The Pit and the Pendulum" for the digital age. Jennifer Riggins is the fourth victim her abductors have taken, and by now they've gotten most of the bugs out of their routine. Deftly snatching her as she's running away from home yet again, the criminal lovers hood her and chain her in a basement in a Massachusetts farmhouse they've rented and put a video feed online for thousands of voyeuristic subscribers around the world who can't stop watching the ultimate reality show. There's only one fly in the ointment: The kidnapping was witnessed by Adrian Thomas, a retired psychology professor on his way home to kill himself after getting a diagnosis of Lewy body dementia, a rare illness that acts like Alzheimer's speeded up. Adrian is already prone to hallucinations and short-term memory lapses, and Det. Terri Collins doesn't find him the ideal witness. On the other hand, now that he's summoned them from the grave, his late wife, his late brother and his late son all provide him with genuinely helpful suggestions, and it doesn't hurt to have Jennifer, now known to her global audience as Number 4, sought by someone with absolutely nothing to lose. Leaning on Mark Wolfe, a registered sex offender, for help doing the unspeakable online research, Adrian slowly zeroes in on the basement where she's being held. But can he rescue her from the fiendish torments her inventive captors have lined up for her? So sadistically measured in its pace that readers will have plenty of time to ask themselves how different they really are from the perverts tuned in to Number 4's sufferings.

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January 1, 2012

A girl named Jennifer Riggins has been kidnapped by a depraved couple who broadcast her torture on a website watched by thousands. Jennifer's only hope is a retired university professor, just diagnosed with a fatal disease, who witnessed the kidnapping. Too scary for me, but Katzenbach has a good track record--three of his books have been made into films.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2012
An abducted teenager. A perverted villain (or villains). A chase to save the victim. These are not unfamiliar ingredients in contemporary thrillers, but Katzenbach reinvents the formula several times over in this absolutely gripping novel. It starts with Adrian Thomas, a retired psychology professor, learning that the memory loss and vivid hallucinations he has been experiencing have been diagnosed as Lewy Body Dementia, a rare diseaseAlzheimer's on steroidsin which the victim suffers from the typical symptoms of dementia along with rapidly progressing loss of bodily functioning. At home and planning suicide, Adrian observes a teen girl apparently being kidnapped. Quickly, it's determined that the girl may have been a runaway, Jennifer Riggins. While the detective on the case plays it by the book, the clock ticks. In interspersed chapters from the points of view of the victim and her abductors, we learn that Jennifer has become Number Four, the unwilling star of a pay-for-view webcast (whatcomesnext.com) in which voyeurs eagerly watch the torture, rape, and, ultimately, murder of the hostage. Spurred on by his wife, brother, and sonall dead but speaking to him through disease-driven hallucinationsAdrian becomes the most unlikely of sleuths, aided by an equally unlikely sidekick, a paroled sex offender, who serves as a guide to the Internet's netherworld. It sounds like an unbelievable premise on multiple levels, but Katzenbach makes it all work, thanks to carefully detailed background on Thomas' disease, to chilling looks at the twisted psyches of the webmasters and the sex offender turned sidekick, and especially to the remarkably textured portraits of Jennifer and Adrian, the former fighting to survive, the latter struggling to keep his disease at bay long enough to save a life. Combining the intricacy of psychological fiction with the pulse-pounding narrative of plot-driven suspense, this may well be the most original thriller since Chelsea Cain's Heartsick (2007). Don't miss it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)