Ordinary man thrust into frantic search
David Bell’s new thriller is tailor-made for the airport bookshelf.
It transforms the waiting area of a major airport into the setting of a noir novel whose hero steps out of his predictable life into one of passion and danger, where anything can happen.
Joshua Fields, a selfdescribed “young schmuck” customarily clad in khaki pants and lace-up Oxford shoes, is living a boringly ordinary life. A few years out of college, he works as a salesman for his dad’s commercial real-estate company, has a more off than on relationship with Chicago-based architect Renee, and chases Xanax with bourbon to survive his fear of flying.
On one of his regular layovers in Atlanta, he runs into Morgan, a gorgeous woman even more nervous than he is. After they share a deeply personal conversation and a passionate kiss, she tells him she must never see him again, and vanishes into the crowd.
Undeterred, Joshua looks her up on Facebook — and discovers that her friends have reported her missing. Abandoning his flight to Tampa, he sets out to find her — first in Nashville, where she last lived, and then the small town of Wykoff, Kentucky, where she grew up.
Meanwhile, ambitious, harried police detective Kimberly Givens, recovering from a recent divorce and dealing with a rebellious adolescent daughter, is searching for a businessman who has disappeared from a town near Wykoff. Their paths join when Joshua is discovered unconscious, his fists bloodied, at an abandoned amusement park.
Bell, a Cincinnati native now teaching in the English department at Western Kentucky University, has a limber style of prose in which action dominates. He parcels out clues cleverly, introducing suspicious new characters along the way and raising doubts about even the most seemingly innocent ones.
Although Kimberly doesn’t stray far from the usual detective mold, Joshua is a less conventional example of the deluded male. Self-aware and desperately weary of a life he can’t bring himself to escape, he knows that what he is pursuing might be all in his imagination.
Even more impressively, Bell makes good use of the discrepancy between Joshua’s fantasy of Morgan and the woman herself. As readers, we don’t see her from the inside, as we do Joshua and Kimberly, but we see enough to know that he is far less central to her life than she is to his. She is not so much the typical femme fatale as a woman with her own set of preoccupations and goals.
Those seeking an intelligent, believable thriller that plays intriguing tricks with the formula of the gullible man and conniving woman won’t be disappointed.
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