Even Steven

September 4, 2000
Corny internal monologues drag down this action-packed third novel by Gilstrap (Nathan's Run; At All Costs), featuring an ill-starred childless couple and a hapless young mom caught between the cops and the bad guys. Still grieving over the recent stillbirth of their first child, a son they named Steven, Susan and Bobby Martin are on a camping trip in the mountains of West Virginia to mark their fifth wedding anniversary when they encounter a frightened little boy and a suspicious man claiming to be his father. After the stranger pulls a gun, Bobby kills him in the ensuing struggle. Finding police ID on the corpse and fearing the consequences of having killed a cop, the Martins take the boy and flee. Having suffered several miscarriages before the stillbirth, Susan believes that God intends the boy to replace Steven. Meanwhile, in nearby Pittsburgh, down-on-her-luck April Simpson discovers that a local drug dealer has kidnapped her two-year-old son, Justin, to hold as a hostage until he can collect a debt from her ne'er-do-well husband. Desperate for her child's safety, April threatens a mob boss with blackmail and is arrested while attempting armed robbery of a department store. Elsewhere, on a rundown farm, the brother of the man Bobby killed is anguishing over not having come to his sibling's rescue. The hero-protagonist (of sorts) who connects all three stories is aging FBI agent Russell Coates, himself embroiled in an old bull/young bull struggle for king of the hill. Although underdeveloped characters, hokey escapes and rescues replete with pulp romance epiphanies give the thriller a comic opera ring, its swift forward motion will speed readers past its flaws. Agent, Molly Friedrich. 7-city author tour.

August 1, 2000
The author of "Nathan's Run" (1996) and "At All Costs" (1998) just keeps getting better and better. Gilstrap likes to take ordinary people and put them in extraordinary situations. Here, for example, a married couple, camping in the West Virginia mountains, stumbles into the middle of a kidnapping. The husband kills one of the kidnappers and rescues the hostage, a little boy. His wife, depressed because they have been unable to have children of their own, decides she wants to keep this one, leaving the husband with a terrible choice: turn himself in and lose the boy, or say nothing and try to live with the knowledge that he killed a man and kidnapped a child. Throw in a few plot twists (the dead kidnapper may or may not be a police officer) and a particularly cunning villain, and you have a fresh, unpredictable thriller that will appeal not only to Gilstrap's fans but also to anyone looking for something different from the usual collection of chase scenes and shoot-'em-ups. ((Reviewed August 2000))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2000, American Library Association.)