Panic

Having read and enjoyed the four books in Jeff Abbott's popular Sam Capra series, I decided to look into some of his other novels. I grabbed a copy of Panic from my local library and dove in. The story begins when Evan Casher, a freelance documentary film maker, gets a strange call from his mother begging him to visit her immediately. Having known his loving mother as a person of calm strength, her panicky and uneven pleading without a reasonable explanation, scared him to his core. He rushed from his home in Houston to her home in Austin to find her dead on her kitchen floor. As he is trying to adjust his mind to what he has come upon, he is jumped by a hidden perpetrator. Just as suddenly another person frees him. A wild start to a novel that follows Evan as the story of his life unravels in a matter of a few days.

Evan slowly comes to gather bits and pieces of information that his parents were not who they seemed to be. Somehow his loving, normal, same-old same-old parents were no longer Ma and Pa Casher, but something else, utterly unbelievable. Like an unexpected kick in the gut, Evan is reeling and cannot get his bearings. He is caught up in intrigue and drama complete disjoint from anything that he could ever image. Suddenly nothing makes sense to him and he finds that there are very few people in his life who he can trust. Left to his own instincts and his own intellect, he pieces the puzzle together bit by bit. However, it is Evan's own unshakable morality that serves as his ultimate guiding polestar.

A tightly written, crisp effort from start to finish. Although not high art by any means, a worthy tale that kept me turning the pages of a good old-fashioned adventure.