The Black Road
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The honeymoon is over for newlywed criminologist Marina Esposito. Her house is in flames. Her detective husband is in a coma. Her baby daughter is missing. And then her phone rings . . . "I have something you've lost," the voice said. "Your daughter." The voice on the other end wants to play a game. If Marina completes a series of bizarre tasks within three days, she wins her daughter's life. If she fails, her little girl dies. The clock starts now. In a desperate race against time, Marina begins to suspect that the madman is someone she knows—someone with a past as troubled as her own. But the truth is far darker than she imagines . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of British author Carver's subpar fourth procedural (after 2013's Cage of Bones), an explosion at a holiday cottage in Suffolk kills the father-in-law of newly married Essex police psychologist Marina Esposito and puts her police detective husband, Phil Brennan, into a coma. Meanwhile, someone kidnaps Marina's three-year-old daughter, Josephina. Conventional subplots involve the tormented narrator of the prologue and the buildup to a predictably steamy relationship between Essex Det. Sgt. Mickey Phillips and Det. Constable Anni Hepburn, a friend of Marina's. Marina must contend with a kinky-sex set of villains with an unconvincing motive for the kidnapping. Carver (the pseudonym of the husband-wife writing team of Martyn and Linda Waites) is better at evoking the grungy atmosphere of run-down English resort areas than she is at portraying the police as gatekeepers to the world of victims they try to provide with voices. Some readers may wish for deeper characterizations and less gore.
