I don't own this book, but I feel a need to review it. Warning - I will spoil virtually everything, so don't read it if you acutally want to read the book. Price has a good premise, but he can't seem to actually deal with the effect of it. From reading the back of the book, almost everyone can see two obvious endings. But Price seems disturbed by both, so he opts out and gives us a third ending. This is cheating. The premise, at the time it was written, was obviously supposed to be inspired by the Susan Smith case. A woman claims she has been carjacked, and her son was in the back of the car. This had a new resonance to me at the time, because of all the missing persons cases that have turned out to not be real. Almost everyone who reads it will think that the woman, Brenda Martin, killed her son and is trying to hide it. Not really. He's dead, but it was an accident and she for some reason dumped the body. When it was first revealed that he had died of an overdose of Benadryl, I assumed later we would find another cause of death, or she would confess to poisoning him. I was wrong. It really was an accident. Of course, since it was indeed this, dumping the body makes no sense. It seems like Price couldn't make her a murderer, but he also couldn't actually make the boy have been abducted, so he came up with a wishy-washy ending that pleases no one. Some people have complained about the length of the book; I personally didn't mind this and until the revelation of the boy's death, I was actually enjoying the book. But it's that ending which keeps the book from being good and moves it into badness.

I decided to read this book when I saw the advertisements on TV for the movie which came out earlier this year. With a cast of Morgan Freeman and Julianne Moore, and a promising storyline, I thought it would be a great read. Unfortunately, while the story was interesting, I felt like I was reading another "gritty thriller" that had little to stand out from other books in this genre. The charactors seemed to want to break free of the stereotypes that they were based on, but never seemed to free themselves from the confines of the "troubled detective" or "gritty reporter". An okay read, but not one I'd revisit, nor would I seek out other books by the author. ( )

I hate to admit it, but this is one of those times when the movie was better, and that does not happen often. ( )

Not Price's best, but any read of Price's is guaranteed to be page-turning and thought-provoking. ( )