The Night Monster

July 20, 2009
Spock-like logic and a bullet-train–paced plot drive Swain's third thriller to feature Florida PI Jack Carpenter (after Midnight Rambler
and Night Stalker
). When Carpenter fails to stop the brutal abduction of his daughter's college basketball teammate, he's painfully reminded of a serial abduction case he bungled 18 years before. Unearned guilt makes this latest case personal. Half-wit giant Lonnie and fellow inmate/mentor “Mouse” escape from an asylum for the criminally insane, and start seizing student nurses. Lonnie twice nearly kills Carpenter, once by tossing a 400-pound Coke machine at him. Carpenter's (and pooch Buster's) “dogged” search takes them to a small, eerie Florida townwhere the victims have been imprisoned. Bullets predictably fly when Carpenter's FBI friend, Ken Linderman, whose daughter has been abducted, pitches in to help. This installment grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go until the last page.

September 1, 2009
Swains third Jack Carpenter adventure has the stalwart child-abduction specialist on the trail of serial abductors. As with his first two efforts in this series, Swain starts fast: on page one, in a flashback, Jack is a rookie cop who encounters a crazed giant abducting a blond college student, and the giant puts Jack in the hospital. Sixteen years later, Jack is still searching for the girl and the giant. After the flashback, Swain jumps to the present, with Jack summoned to an elementary school where an autistic boy has disappeared. Jacks encyclopedic (and somewhat unbelievable) knowledge of autistic children unerringly leads him to a nearby pond where an alligator is dragging the boy to certain death. Jack wrestles the gator and saves the boyall by page 18. The remaining 300 pages careen on at the same pace. Serial abductors have indeed been reported in Florida, but Swain takes that fact and molds it to genre formula; some readers may tire of Jacks unyielding stalwartness and boundless omniscience. Others, however, will find thrilling comfort food in those traits and the formula behind them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)