A page-turning thriller from the best-selling author of Tully.
A heavily pregnant young woman is leaving the shopping mall to head home on a horribly hot day in Texas. Her normal life of shopping, husband, children, with the extra excitement of the imminent baby, stretches before her. And then she is bundled into a car and kidnapped by a desperate young man. What does he want? Where are they going?
The gripping scenes alternate between the desperate husband pursuing her by car and helicopter with an alarmingly laid-back FBI man, who may or may not be as good as he thinks he is at rescuing hostages, and the increasingly imperiled wife. Eleven Hours is a tour de force of storytelling power from an author with a proven track-record of delivering the goods.
Industry Reviews
Beat-the-clock suspense in a pedestrian kidnaping narrative. After stabs at American Gothic (Tully, 1994) and at high-brow whodunit (Red Leaves, 1996), Russian-born novelist Simons tries her hand at a mean-and-lean woman-in-periler, as far as possible from the genre's traditional willowy divorcee heroines. During a last-minute spending spree in a Dallas shopping mall, Desdemona "Didi" Wood, in her ninth month of pregnancy and experiencing what she imagines are false contractions, meets Lyle Luft, a goodlooking, clean-cut twentysomething fellow who gallantly offers to carry her bags. She brushes him off, then encounters him again in the mall parking lot, where the searing noontime heat, her soon-to-be-born baby, and Luft's menacing tone make it almost impossible for her not to get into his van. Meanwhile, Didi's husband Rich wonders why Didi stood him up for lunch. A call to Didi's cell-phone brings out the beast in Lyle, who begins to eat, verbally abuse, and sadistically torture the poor woman. At the mall, Rich discovers Didi's car, scattered packages, and suspicious bloodstains. The author then pulls us through predictable scenes with vacuous mall drones and skeptical cops while cross-cutting to the loudly suffering Didi and simmering psycho Lyle, who brutally assaults anyone who gets too close. Fortunately, Rich has a soulmate in stoic FBI kidnaping expert Scott Somerville, who is soon on Lyle's trail. When Didi's contractions begin, Lyle reveals that he is going to kill her after she gives birth and then flee with the infant to Mexico. The gory scenes that follow are made as agonizingly hideous as Simons's spare prose will permit. Blatantly manipulative and gratuitously horrific; still, this might just be the breakout novel its author intends. (Kirkus Reviews)
