Hunting Down Amanda (Hardcover)

What all his books have in common is a growing assurance as you turn the first few pages that you're in good, honourable hands--that the author won't trick you shamelessly or go off on some tedious tangent. So a book that begins with a horrible plane explosion which rains down fire over a Massachusetts village can shift seamlessly into a jazz musician's hunt for his lost love and an executive hit-man's search for a little girl without losing a beat.

When that plane crashes over the small coastal town of Hunnicut (in a scene probably better not read during or just before a flight of your own), five-year-old Amanda Dodson--"a roundish little mixed-race girl with a quiet, thoughtful manner"--escapes from her babysitter's burning house and wanders into the woods. That's where her young mother, Carol, who works as a cocktail waitress (and does occasional sexual favours for customers), finds her after an agonising search. With Amanda is one of the plane's passengers, apparently brought back to life by the girl's formidable healing abilities. "Now they'll come after her!" Carol Dodson cries, before fleeing with the child to New York City.

In Manhattan she has a brief encounter with a grieving saxophone genius named Lonnie Blake. Captivated by Carol's resemblance to his late wife, Blake tries to find her again, but he is not the only one hunting down Carol and Amanda. Others want to capture the little girl--and exploit her amazing healing powers for profit.

In lesser hands, these ingredients might add up to nothing more than a shameless potboiler, but Klavan has powers of his own--a magic touch that humanises even the smallest characters and makes them a part of our own world. --Dick Adler

Review
Klavan is a writer's writer - which is not to say that the ordinary reader will not be comprehensively pinned to his seat by the Hitchcockian suspense on offer here. On a cold night in New York, jazz musician Lonnie tries to forget the pain of his wife's death by consoling himself with a beautiful young woman, Carol, who is escaping from an unknown attacker. She vanishes, leaving no trace - and Blake's attempts to track her down soon to lead a lethal chase. Carol's daughter is part of a secret that people are prepared to kill and die for. The author handles this dark narrative with unshakable panache. (Kirkus UK)

Edgar-winning Klavan (The Uncanny, 1998, etc.) offers a stylish new thriller that turns on a jazz variation of the Orpheus and Eurydice legend. In a fabulous, Lockerbie-like opening, a 747 jet blows up at 30,000 feet, raining fire from its freshly filled gas tanks on a tourist town below, where houses explode and burning people run everywhere. A lone surviving passenger (vice president of Helix Pharmaceuticals) walks out of a woods without a scratch on him, carrying a little girl named Amanda. Klavan then shifts into the Greek legend. Orpheus is depressed black tenor sax player Lonnie Blake, whose wife was murdered two years earlier. When a prostitute named Carol begs him to take her into his apartment and save her from a gravel-faced figure in the night, Lonnie seems to recover his dead wife Suzanne. But Carol leaves, and Lonnie starts a long chase after her, only to discover she's also being pursued by super-smooth, ice-cold killer Winter (or shall we say Pluto?) Winter has a vast lech for Carol, but what he really wants is her five-year-old daughter Amanda, who can heal terminal cancer victims and raise the dead. She and her mother complete the character of Eurydice (or spring-bearing Persephone). Winter is North American bureau chief of Executive Decisions, a private force that hires itself to companies and countries for bloody covert actions. E.D. has been retained by billion-dollar Helix Pharmaceuticals to recover the offspring of Carol's dead husband, a healer the drug company used for experiments in the genetically enhanced laying-on of hands. A story that opens with dynamite should close with TNT, and Klavan's sixth outing does indeed end strikingly on a reversal of the legend. Without the humor that lightened True Crime (1995), but, still, certain to please readers who like their entertainment with literary flourishes. And, yes, there is a cave of Tartarean darkness. (Kirkus Reviews)

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