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Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Lyons Public Library | M CRAIG | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Library | YA FIC CRA | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Clary Hale thinks she has finally escaped her horrible past and created an idyllic family life until one day her children wake to find their mother gone--kidnapped by the psychopath who has been obsessed with her since youth.
Author Notes
Kit Reed was born Lillian Craig in San Diego, California on June 7, 1932. She received a bachelor's degree from the College of Notre Dame of Maryland in 1954. In the 1950's, she worked as a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times and for the New Haven Register. She was an author who wrote novels and stories in various genres for children, teens, and adults.
Her short story collections included Mister Da V. and Other Stories; The Revenge of the Senior Citizens; Thief of Lives; Weird Women, Wired Women; Dogs of Truth; What Wolves Know; and The Story Until Now. Her books included Armed Camps, Fort Privilege, @Expectations, Bronze, The Baby Merchant, The Night Children, Son of Destruction, Where, and Mormama. She also wrote several novels under the pen name Kit Craig and a horror novel, Blood Fever, under the pen name Shelley Hyde. She died several months after being diagnosed with a brain tumor on September 24, 2017 at the age of 85.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A genuinely frightening, unpredictable plot throbbing with menace and escalating horror, appealing characters thrust into mortal danger, and a chilling portrait of a charismatic serial killer distinguish this outstanding psychological thriller, the pseudonymous Craig's debut. The morning after a homicidal psychopath abducts Clary Hale from her Connecticut home, her three children awake bewildered by her absence. Michael and his sister Teah are teenagers; their brother, Tom, is 4. As military brats (their father was lost commanding a nuclear submarine on a secret mission), they are accustomed to obeying orders, so at first they believe the phone caller who says their mother is also on a secret project and that they are not to tell anyone she is gone. Soon, however, they decide to try to find her, using the one clue they have: the address of their maternal grandparents (whom they have never met). With their not-too-bright cleaning lady as driver, the kids begin a hegira down the East coast that brings them--and their captive mother--ever closer to triggering the obsessed villain's bloodlust. Craig excels in her depiction of a wholesome American family tipped into a horrifying situation. Her control of narrative momentum is unflagging, and her assured prose is levels above the usual standards of the genre. BOMC and QPB selections. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Psychothriller by first-novelist Craig sustained throughout by rich stylization. Craig starts off with a literary bang, introducing her plot as indirectly as Faulkner introduces Popeye's rape of Temple Drake in Sanctuary--and in nearly as high-flown a voice as Faulkner's. Can Craig go the distance at this level? Well, the fine vocalizing never stops, but the plot at last turns on the familiar villainies of the obsessive psychopath we first met in Thomas Harris's Red Dragon. Harris's serial murderer identified with Blake's drawing of Lucifer; Craig's magnetically handsome killer (who kills by the family) is crazed by a tree of rage he believes is growing within him and whose image he's been carving in scar tissue on his body--a fact telegraphed about half-way through the novel. Clarada Hale, a Navy widow with three kids, has been waiting for four years for her MIA submariner husband to return from the dead. Instead, a figure from her past reappears and kidnaps her: Cleve Morrow, a prodigy who loved Clary but murdered her parents when she was 17, was put into a mental institution and there educated himself in criminal law, anatomy, and whatnot. Now, like De Niro in Cape Fear, he's back. The story, though, is told largely through the eyes of Clary's kids--Teah, 16, Michael, 15, and Tommy, a toddler--who find themselves alone in their house one morning. Where's mother? Gone??? They can't believe it and keep house for themselves for nearly a week awaiting her return, get drunk, and reduce the place to a stinking pigsty. Clues arise that get them to drive down the East Coast in search of Mom and toward the fated meeting with Cleve and his prisoner Clary, with an inescapable final chase of the family through the Florida jungle. A debut that should be a big hit and begs for film.
Booklist Review
A long time ago, Clary Hale fell in love, but her lover never really returned the affection. Oh, he tried. But his chief love was the twisted psyche inside him, a tree hoping to grow but stunted by abuse and the fiery pain that followed. The only help he found was Clary's family, but it wasn't enough and he was put away, forgotten. Fast forward to now, to Clary's kids, and the world they inhabit: a movie-fixated teenage son, a teenage daughter with young punk lover, a baby boy who needs his mom, a Navy dad who went MIA, a doddery old neighbor who means well, and a love-crossed housekeeper who is easily distracted--and tricked. From this world Clary is suddenly abducted. And into it steps a killer painted in sly shades, a man with a dazzling white shirt that he never takes off, who never quite leaves, a man whose luring eyes, smooth hands, and manipulative voice suggest a tree that has never grown straight. Craig's publishers are hoping for a Silence of the Lambs-like takeoff from Gone. Craig's style--insinuating, opaque, sotto voce--is very different from that of Thomas Harris, but the result is close to the same, and the publishers may get what they want. For those who like to be scared without having their stomachs turned by gore or their intelligence insulted, Gone is pretty close to perfect. ~--Peter Robertson
Library Journal Review
In this fast-paced thriller, novelist Kit Reed ( Catholic Girls , LJ 8/87) has taken on a new pseudonym as well as a new genre. Clary Hale's husband Tom, a navy captain, was lost at sea four years ago. When Clary disappears, her three children--Teah, Mike, and Tommy (aged 16, 15, and four)--believe she's gone on a secret mission to find their father. But as time passes, they realize she's been kidnapped by Cleve Morrow, a charismatic madman from her past. They trail the pair from Connecticut to the jungles of Florida, where a tense cat-and-mouse game is played to the death. Of course, the idea of two teenagers and a child embarking on a cross-country rescue mission is silly, but the author's portrait of Cleve, the seductive psychopath, is so stunning that it's easy to forget the ridiculous premise--and hard to put down the book. Recommended. BOMC and Quality Paperback selections.-- Rebecca House Stankowski, Purdue Univ. Calumet Lib., Hammond, Ind. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.