The first of several murders in Wendy Corsi Staub’s newest thriller occurs on page 7, and the suspense hardly lets up from that point on.
Marin Quinn gave up her newborn son at the insistence of her husband, Garvey Quinn. Elsa Cavalon adopted that same child, and is now on the brink of finalizing the adoption of a seven-year-old girl, Renny. The horror that binds these two women is that Jeremy, the biological son of one and adoptive son of the other, was kidnapped while playing outside of his home fifteen years earlier; less than a year ago, Mike Fantoni, the detective the Cavalons hired after Jeremy was first kidnapped and who vowed not to rest until the boy had been found, tells them that Jeremy had been taken overseas to Mumbai India and murdered shortly afterwards. Garvey Quinn, a man who had hoped to become the Governor of the State of New York, is now serving a prison term for having engineered that crime [among others].
But the nightmare of that loss seems to be repeating itself, as the new family of each of these women is threatened, and no part of their present lives seems to be outside the reach of a determined and very deranged mind.
The book alternates p.o.v. between the two women at its heart [as well as that of the killer, from time to time], as they variously run to the suburbs of Boston and an Upper West Side aerie in Manhattan. But try as they might, they each find that there seems to be no safe haven.
A tale of vengeance with a stunning twist as the conclusion nears, “Scared to Death” is great escapist fare, one you’ll want to read with all the lights on.
