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Bleeding Heart |
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| Bleeding Heart by Martha Powers Simon & Schuster 320 pages, August 2000 ISBN 0684866102 Reviewed by Susan McBride In her first mainstream release Sunflower (1999), Martha Powers broke one of the biggest taboos in mystery fiction: her victims were children. She wrote a story of a serial killer who preyed on blond girls, and she made the tale a compelling one with a contemporary tone. I like rule breakers. And I like Powers' ability to tell her own stories without boundaries. In Bleeding Heart, a child is at the crux of the plot again. A little boy named Tyler disappears from a shopping mall where his mother had gone to return a gift. Whomever has taken the boy has done the same thing before, a crude experiment by someone identified as The Warrior, who enjoys violating people's personal safety without their knowing it. He also fancies himself as the leader of a nonexistent tribe, and steals children in an effort to train them to be stoic and obedient. Sometimes he lets them go when they've passed his tests. Others may not meet so fortunate a fate. Maggie Collier lives in a small Wisconsin town with her son Jake, in order to be near her father-in-law George. A widow, she lost her husband Mark in a car crash - an accident that also took the life of Mark's mistress and their unborn child. Maggie knows the truth about her dead spouse's infidelities, but tries to shield them from her son. She's close to George, who seems a good enough grandfather to Jake and friend to Maggie, though he does have a weakness for booze and for speaking when he shouldn't. When George is found murdered after a poker game at the country club, the plot switches into high gear as the investigation into his death may or may not intersect with the disappearance of Tyler McKenzie two years before. Maggie is a protective mother and generally a sensible woman. But she puts her son's life in danger as well as her own when she figures out that George's killing was more suspicious than a robbery gone bad. Could photos of an outing at a Renaissance Fair have contributed to his death? After all, George had the photos with him at the poker game, had shown them around and may have even spotted a boy he thought was the missing Tyler in one of them. Was Tyler's kidnapper one of George's poker buddies? Could it be possible that George had been murdered because he knew too much? There's an interesting mix of small town cozy and edginess in Bleeding Heart that make for an absorbing book. Fans of Mary Higgins Clark will find much to enjoy in this modern day whodunit. |
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