Mine

In the six years since his second hard-cover (Usher's Passing, 1984), McCammon has carved out a mass-market horror fiefdom all his own with the immensely popular Swan Song, Stinger, and The Wolf's Hour. Now he's back in hard-cover with his first, and feverishly exciting, nonoccult novel ever - albeit one that features a memorable, if human, monster: Mary Terrell, a.k.a. Mary Terror, a crazed 60's radical who triggers an ultraviolent cross-country hunt. Mary has been hiding out in menial jobs, drugging herself into hallucinatory rages ever since the FBI gunned down most of her Weatherman-like clique, the Storm Front, 20 years ago. But now a coded message in Rolling Stone calls for surviving Storm Front members to gather in N.Y.C. Was it placed by charismatic Storm Front leader Jack Gardiner, Mary's long-ago lover? As a present for Jack, mad Mary sneaks into an Atlanta hospital and kidnaps a baby - little David, newborn to iron-willed journalist Laura Clayborne. Having just dumped her unfaithful husband, Laura's not about to lose her child too, so when the FBI fingers Mary - who kills several people while escaping Atlanta - as David's abductor, Laura sets after the madwoman on her own. Meanwhile, in N.Y.C., with David in tow, Mary meets up with two Storm Front survivors, both gone middle-class - but not with Jack, who may still be alive in California. Mary heads west, pausing in Ann Arbor - where Laura picks up her trail, sparking a ferocious chase that features, among other over-the-top attractions, a blizzard, enraged pit bulls, homegrown surgery, a mutilated FBI agent on a rampage - and a completely predictable resolution. Little new here - even the 60's radical as Frankenstein has been done before, in John Katzenbach's Day of Reckoning (1989) - but McCammon delivers prime suspense and explosive payoffs in this maximum overdrive, page-whipping thriller. (Kirkus Reviews)