Title: Still Missing
Author: Chevy Stevens
Genre: Thriller
Read: Late Sept 2010
Summary: Ambivalent
I picked this up because it was edited by the same editor that I use (the amazing Renni Browne), represented by a top WME Agent, and debuted on the NYT best seller list. It’s not normally my cup of tea, even though I am very guilty of reading plenty of chick novels. Essentially, it’s about a woman who’s kidnapped, held for a year, and repeatedly raped, by a creep she can only call “the Freak.” In the present she’s escaped and is attempting to deal with this rather horrific course of events. The flashbacks to her captivity are intense and gripping in the same way that the police reports for serial killer cases are. They certainly feel realistic and whipped by, but they also left me with a kind of “dirty” feeling for enjoying them — not the what was being done mind you, but the reading of it. The present tense “action” however bored the hell out of me, for there was no action, merely interior monologue and brief conversations with her therapist. Obviously getting over such a thing would be HARD, but it doesn’t really make for a fun read, or represent a mental process I really need to work through a fictional telling of. Then in the last third, after the backstory has caught up to the present, the book takes a whacky left turn and the whole thing turns out to be a cockamamy conspiracy and non-coincidence. This, while easy enough to read, just bugged me. The writing was clean and out of the way. You didn’t notice it — which is about right for this sort of thing. So overall a was just left with the sordid tale of her capture, captivity, and escape, which was pretty good, but felt exploitive. The rest I could leave back at the cabin in the woods.
