Burn-Ted Dekker and Erin Healy

Burn
Ted Dekker and Erin Healy
Thomas Nelson, Jan 2010, $24.99
ISBN: 9781595544711

Salazar Sanso offers a deal to seventeen years old Gypsy Janeal Mikkado who feels like a fish out of water amongst her people as she hates the nomadic lifestyle of moving seasonally between California and New Mexico. He will help sponsor her lifestyle change in return for her stealing back some money her father possesses, which he insists will save her dad’s life. She agrees, but the plot fails. Impatient Sanso and his followers attack the kumpania encampment, burning it to the ground killing most of the Gypsies in the inferno.

Janeal, her boyfriend Robert and her best friend Katie survive though they are separated. Fifteen years later they meet with Janeal still haunted by how she acted betraying her father, family, and friends. Now, she has a chance for some atonement though she believes redemption is beyond her grasp.

Readers will enjoy this intriguing allegorical thriller with a fabulous late twist. The story line is character driven as the survivors struggle even fifteen years later with what happened on that gruesome day. Although the Christian parables are at times jammed into the plot too frequently, as they did with Kiss, Ted Dekker and Erin Healy provides an engaging contemporary character driven Christian thriller as surviving the fire does not mean surviving the Burn imprinted in your brain.

Harriet Klausner