Buy This Book: Still Missing by Chevy Stevens

I've been reading a lot about abducted women recently, from the gripping and creative Room:A Novel, by Emma Donoghue, to the unputdownable real-life story that I believe inspired it, Jaycee Lee Dugard's A Stolen Life.

So when I read the description of Chevy Stevens' Still Missing, which revolves around the abduction and year-long captivity of a young Realtor taken from a house showing, I have to admit I nearly passed, thinking I'd had enough of this type of dark, woman-as-victim story. But the book had just been named the International Thriller Writers' Best Thriller of the Year-First Book, so I decided to download the first chapter to see what had impressed Ms. Stevens' colleagues so mightily.

Told in the form of heroine Annie O'Sullivan's first-person narration to her psychologist after escaping, Still Missing grabbed me from the opening lines, deftly blending past and present to tell a gripping, harrowing, and brilliantly-crafted story, not only of survival but of complex characters (Annie O'Sullivan's about as far from passive victim as you can get, for instance) and the web of secrets that they spin. There's mystery, too, the kind that keeps you guessing but never for a minute feels like a cheat.

If you're going to try one new thriller this year, I very highly recommend that you start with Chevy Stevens' Still Missing. Then do what I'm doing and pick up her brand new one, Never Knowing.

Very highly recommended.

A Rant on a Review

I was thrilled to see this weekend that the Houston Chronicle book section chose to run Maureen Corrigan's Washington Post review of Nora Roberts' new romantic suspense novel, Black Hills. I'm a big fan of Roberts' hardcover romantic suspense, especially past winners such as Montana Sky, Angels Fall, and Northern Lights along with the futuristic police procedurals she writes as J.D. Robb. That's not to say I love all of Roberts books; I haven't, so I was eager to read the reviewer's opinion on this outing.

And more than that, I was thrilled to see a romantic suspense novel (the genre I write) seriously reviewed. Though newspapers occasionally deign to offer print space to reviews of mystery/suspense/thrillers, the other genres are treated like publishing's red-headed stepchildren... embarrassments that must be kept locked in the basement so they won't rot readers' brains.

My celebration didn't last long. Corrigan not only didn't like the book -- which is her perfect right -- her disdain for the entire genre came through at every turn. Phrases such as "smooch-and-shoot saga," "tussling in the sack again," and the offensively-outdated "this latest bodice-ripper" tell me this reviewer set out with a bias, with her hypersensitive Bowdler-calibrated radar quivering for the slightest hint of (insert gasp here) S-E-X.

Funny, how love scenes (which are often present) rarely come up in reviews of books by male authors writing thrillers, mystery, or horror. Funny, how in reviews of female-written, female-targeted romance, that's just about the only thing the critics ever notice.

Though Publisher's Weekly and other reviewers have praised Black Hills, I have no problem at all with the fact that Maureen Corrigan didn't. What chapped my hide was the condescending language and the implication that female fantasy is somehow inferior to male.