I received this book as a contest prize.I'm going toLeft Coast Crime 2009, and they've been giving away books by some of the authors who will be attending.

I'd never read a book by Louise Ure before, and I was absolutely mesmerized. This is actually her second novel (the first was Forcing Amaryllis). Both are stand-alones, not part of a series.

The protagonist of The Fault Tree is Cadence Moran, an auto mechanic who has been blind since she was in a car accident eight years earlier. Her 3-year-old niece was killed in the accident, and Cadence has been unable to forgive herself.

Walking home from work late one evening, Cadence is clipped by a car. Although not seriously hurt, she is bruised and shaken, and her hand-carved cane is broken. Assuming it was just an accident, she doesn't report the incident, and goes on with her routine.

The next day, she is visited by homicide detectives who are investigating the murder of one of her elderly neighbours in a presumed robbery about the same time as she was hit. Initially reluctant to get involved, Cadence changes her mind when she is attacked again, presumably by the robbers who think she was a witness to the crime.

Cadence is a strong, self-sufficient woman, and her refusal to give in to whoever is stalking her is inspiring and riveting. This is one of those books that I could have read straight through without putting it down if my eyes hadn't kept trying to close. I'm definitely going to look for Forcing Amaryllis as well as Ure's third book Liars Anonymous, to be released April 14. ( )

dramatic good book. Wondered how accurate the description of the blind lady's behaviour was. But I only know 4-5 blind people. ( )

http://lesasbookcritiques.blogspot.co... ( )

A car mechanic is the only witness to the escape of a couple of killers from a small-scale robbery gone wrong. What the killers don't know is that the witness is blind. Not that it matters - she still can provide useful information to the police about their vehicle. As she dodges their attempts to silence her, she copes with long-term guilt that the accident that led to her blindness also caused her niece's death. The image of a fault tree - a form of analysis to see how failures in a system are interlinked - is a neat metaphor for the book. The hapless killers (particularly one of them) are portrayed sensitively, and the characters in general are well drawn. The "fem jep" nature of the plot is offset by the interesting character who has a strong independent streak (you'd have to, to work as a blind car mechanic) and the ending fuses those together so that it's not just over the top, it flies exuberantly right over Mount Everest.