Margolin delivers a suspenseful novel that will keep you interested in the story. Not a lot of interest for a book club read, but a fun beach reach.   

            In 1985, a piercing scream breaks through the still of a beautiful summer night and changes Vanessa Kohler’s life forever and she believes her friend and lover killed her boss.  Twenty years later, Kohler is a supermarket tabloid reporter viewing a video about adults fighting at a little league game and knows that she must find the man who drove a mechanical pencil into an aggressive father’s throat. 

 

            Ami Vergano is an attorney and single parent bring up her son, Ryan.  She watches in horror as her tenant, Dan Morelli, thrusts a mechanical pencil into the town’s bully.    This incident baffles Ami who doesn’t understand how her gentle kind-spoken tenant could do such a thing.  

 

            Vanessa Kohler’s father is running for President and he’s a powerful general.  Her father had her institutionalized after the 1985 incident.  She fears him and has been trying to make everyone understand just how evil he really is.  Her father is a master manipulator, and an extremely powerful man who killed without thought, especially to protect himself.

 

            Dan Morelli is the man in the middle of the action.  Who is he and why did he deliver such a violent punishment to a loud-mouth, bully of a father?  His temper has pushed his covert lifestyle into the open and his life is in danger.

 

            Margolin’s characters converge in Portland, Oregon.  Vanessa to prove that her father is a criminal, Dan to escape the spotlight and return to his life on the run, and the general to finally rid himself of the past in one sweep action.  Ami, drawn into the fray by circumstance, must figure out who to believe and help expose the real truth.

 

Rating: 6.5