Dead Time

March 3, 2008
Bestseller White juggles too many story lines that never quite coalesce in his uneven 16th thriller to feature Boulder, Colo., psychologist Alan Gregory (after 2007's Dry Ice). On a trip to Manhattan, soon after adopting the son of a close friend who died in a terrorist blast in Israel, Alan meets with his ex-wife, Merideth, who asks him to help her and her fiancé, political consultant Eric Leffler, track down their surrogate, who disappeared soon after becoming pregnant with their child. Initially reluctant, Alan eventually agrees to investigate. Aided by his Boulder detective friend, Sam Purdy, Alan gets drawn into a web of lies that stretches back to an ill-fated Grand Canyon hiking trip when Eric and the surrogate were in college together. White never recovers his rhythm after beginning the narrative with fractured accounts of the hiking expedition and then abruptly switching to Alan and Merideth's story. An unsatisfying climax and a distracting subplot involving a long-ago adoption make this one of the weaker entries in the series.

January 1, 2008
White constructs a deeply layered, character-driven meditation on dead times, as in times of mourning, times of personal paralysis in the face of crisis or disappointment, times of waiting for someone else to make the next move, or, even, bring a fetus to term. Yet, for all of clinical psychologist Whites ruminations, this novel chugs along on a number of suspenseful fronts. The dead time of shock and grief just after the discovery of a mutual friends sudden death in a terrorist bombing attack in Israel brings Boulder psychotherapist Alan Gregory (in his fifteenth appearance as Whites series hero) and ex-wife Meredith together at the friends memorial. The discomfort of their reunion is communicated by having the point of view switch back and forth between the two; while this technique gives an intriguingdouble perspective to the action, readers will notice that White doesnt bother to give Alan and Meredith separate rhythms in the way they express their thoughts. Meredith wants Alan to help her find someone who has gone missing, the surrogate mother of her child. The surrogates disappearance connects to a long-ago disappearance of another girl on the floor of the Grand Canyon. Beautifully orchestrated in plot but very long-winded: the tension could have been tightened dramatically by cutting about 100pages.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)