Skip tracer Sarah Keller, the protagonist of Edgar-winner Meg Gardiner's The Shadow Tracer, has just nabbed an elusive target when she hears her five-year-old daughter, Zoe, is at the hospital after a school-bus accident. Zoe is deemed fine--until doctors make a shocking discovery, one that causes Sarah to take her daughter and run. She keeps running, both from a trio of killers who want Zoe for nefarious reasons and an FBI agent who wants to use the girl and Sarah as bait. Sarah gets help from a U.S. marshal and a nun, but she knows it's up to her to save her child.
Readers will go on the run with Sarah, too, because the story hits the ground at 60 mph and keeps revving from there. Sarah is a believable combination of everywoman and someone who uses her skip-tracing skills to keep Zoe and herself off the grid. There's a delicious hint of sexual tension between her and Marshal Lawless (yes, Lawless), whom she alternately needs and hates.
The action scenes are fun, especially one involving a baby in the back of a pickup truck; one can almost imagine Gardiner laughing with glee while writing it. The denouement in an airplane junkyard is highly suspenseful and cinematic, too. But none of this would matter if not for the characters, equally vivid whether they're bad or good or somewhere in between. Combined with the blistering pace, The Shadow Tracer is a thriller that fans should not skip. --Elyse Dinh-McCrilllis, freelance writer/editor, blogging at Pop Culture Nerd