I could not put Michael Marshall's latest down. He's created a multi-layered thriller involving a likeable protagonist plus a host of remarkable satellite characters who make you cringe & groan with curiosity & anticipation. Set in the Pacific Northwest, the prologue of THE INTRUDERS starts with an apparently random home invasion, murder & fire. Then we meet Jack Whalen, ex-LA beat cop & a one-book author who's struggling to write another. Instead, he's sitting staring out at the forested panorama & remembering, for some odd reason, a high school classmate & how she didn't quite fit in & who, after trying to get the attention of the handsomest senior jock, committed suicide. That morning, Jack's wife had driven to Seattle for a meeting at her ad agency. That's why, a couple of years ago, they'd moved up to this idyllic little mountain burg on the eastside of the Cascades from Southern California, where they'd met & married ten years before. Then that very same jock, now 20 years older, calls Jack, wanting to see him. Gary Fisher brings a strange tale and Jack, with his beat cop instincts slowly coming alert, senses his visitor isn't telling him everything & some of what he's said doesn't ring true. But Jack has no time for Gary as he's just discovered his wife's cell phone has been found in a Seattle taxi. On Cannon Beach in Oregon, a nine year old girl is struggling with nightmares, her parents' uneasy marriage, & something far more frightening: loss of memory & the arrival of a stranger as she's out on the beach wondering how she got there. When the idea that she's got to go somewhere sets her traveling, the people who help her along the way come to rue it as this nice, little girl with headaches has a killer's instincts. THE INTRUDERS is a tale well-spun with lashings of deceit & determination, action & clues, body & mind invasions & chases, & other scary stuff. It's a thriller that has you connecting dots like mad, except, are you connecting the right ones? Unto the final page, you won't know!
That morning, Jack's wife had driven to Seattle for a meeting at her ad agency