Two years ago, Dr. Gina Brady broke Thomas Prescott's heart, but now her panic-stricken satellite phone call starts it beating again with a fury. Thugs kidnapped the good doctor from the remote jungle village where she was working, and now the retired homicide detective's expert skills are desperately needed to save her.
Led by a colorful, but perhaps untrustworthy local guide, Prescott journeys deep into the Bolivian Amazon, plunging into a world where the only thing more dangerous than the gun-toting drug traffickers and the ruthless tribesmen, is the jungle itself. When Gina's trail leads to a chance encounter with an archaeological expedition, the search for the missing doctor takes on even deadlier consequences. But Prescott will not relent in this punishing quest until, once again, he holds Gina in his arms.
In smooth, limpid prose [Pirog] builds a stunner of a novel, winding up a series of tense situations and exploding them in scenes of shock and surprise. Each time you think you’ve reached the core of things [...] the rug is pulled from under you. The mood at the end might strike readers as undeservedly joyous, but we’ve needed that. Perhaps we didn’t need the recipe for cocaine, but it’s there, too: dump the leaves of the coca plant into a vat, then soak them in chlorine and gasoline.
... unconvincing ... Reliance in a crucial scene on the hoariest of clichés—a misfiring gun—doesn’t help the reader feel the perils are real. This one’s strictly for series fans.
