Friday, September 28, 2007

DeadFall-Robert Liparulo

DeadFall
Robert Liparulo
Thomas Nelson, Nov 2007, $24.95, 496 pp.
ISBN 9780785261797

In Saskatchewan, Canada is the small isolated hamlet of Fiddler Falls where everyone knows everybody else and crime is non-existent; but that serenity changes when the strangers come to town. Declan, his teenage brother Julian and four other men and women have come with a specific goal, to test a new weapons system using a satellite driven by nuclear power to power up the attached laser. They want to see how accurate it is when targeting specific objects and people. They kill the town’s only police officer but his wife Laura and son Dillon get free.

They are separated and each falls in with a group of hunters from the United States who wanted to take a two week vacation from the stress of home. Hutch and Dillon find each other and make it to the rendezvous point his mother told him about. While Laura and Terry also head for their vacation cabin unfortunately, Declan and his pals are right behind them and what ensures is the biggest cat and mouse game with the stakes the lives of the townsfolk, the hunters and the mother and son they rescued.

Think Deliverance with a high tech weapons system that is being tested by an evil sociopath who views the lives he takes and the people he rounds up as cattle to be culled. Then the reader will have some idea what DEADFALL is all about. The action never lets up in this thrill a page, pulse pounding blockbuster. Robert Liparulo is a grand storyteller who keeps thriller readers’ interest with his two groups competing against each other in a winner take-all survival contest.

Harriet Klausner

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