Reconstruction

Starred review from February 11, 2008
Near the start of this masterful thriller from Herron (Why We Die
), Jaime Segura, a young immigrant to Britain with a gun, takes several hostages one morning at the South Oxford Nursery School, including a teacher, the school’s cleaner, parent Eliot Pedlar and Pedlar’s three-year-old twin sons. Jaime is confused and afraid but he’s not crazy, and what he wants becomes apparent very slowly. Though Secret Service agent Ben Whistler’s usual beat is the MI6 accounting department, he’s summoned to the nursery school after Jaime tells the surrounding police that Ben is the only one he’ll talk to. Then there’s the matter of the quarter of a billion pounds that’s been stolen from the Service. How Herron is able to tie all these events together will test the sleuthing ability of even the most savvy readers as one surprise engenders another. The intricate plot, coupled with Herron’s breezy writing style (“Ben Whistler looked like what you got when you thought about a rugby player, then fixed his teeth”), results in superior entertainment that makes most other novels of suspense appear dull and slow-witted by comparison.

April 1, 2008
Adult/High School-This contemporary British novel deals with terrorists, hostage taking, and characters who appear to keep changing allegiances. The story opens on a perfectly ordinary day in suburbia. Then the scene changes. An old man approaches a young man, but the young man hits him with his backpack and flees, while a car hits the old man. In the midst of this a gun is lost and then found, and by page 50 the young man has taken a father, his twin sons, and two nursery school employees as hostages. Scenes move from character to character, and with each shift readers learn a bit more about whats actually going on, who is responsible for what, and why individuals who think the world revolves around them are in for a rude awakening. Teens who arent already Anglophiles may need to brush up on British slang and idioms to thoroughly understand all that happens, but the reward is good escape literature that should provide a few hours of diversion and entertainment."Joanne Ligamari, Rio Linda School District, Sacramento, CA"

Copyright 2008 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 1, 2008
Like a good movie, this novel, with its shifting points of view and scenes described in close-up or long shot, grabs the reader from the first page. Its a seemingly straightforward story of a hostage situation (a man is holding a handful of adults and children at gunpoint in a British school), but the author packs it full of questions. Who is the gunman, and should we fear him or feel sympathy for him? Why was the British Secret Service trying to spirit him away from a public car park? Why does one of the hostages, given the opportunity to escape, actually turn around and walk back into the building? Herron parcels out the information in very small doses, keeping us constantly on our toes. His cast of characters is a classic thriller staple: an assortment of types (the defiant hostage, the worried father, the frightened captor), but each with his or her own subtle variations that make them real people.This is one of those novels where you read it, not just to see what happens at the end, but to see what happens on the very next page.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)