Lisa Gardner: The Survivors’ Club

Bantam (Paperback), ISBN 0-553-58451-0

Jillian, Carol and Meg, although all beautiful, are three very different women. Jillian comes across as forceful and dominant; Carol as a bit of an emotional wreck; and Meg seems naïve and young.

But all share one thing in common: they all survived an attack by the murderous College Hill Rapist. Together they formed the Survivors’ Club and bullied the Rhode Island cops into intensifying the hunt for the rapist. As a result, the police arrested Eddie Como and charged him with the crimes on the basis of a DNA match. When he arrives for the first day of his trial, however, a professional hitman assassinates Como. Then the hitman dies in a car bombing.

Onto this turbulent scene comes state cop Roan Griffin, recovering from traumas of his own. Griffin suffered a breakdown after, in quick succession, his wife died of cancer and a serial child-rapist and -killer he’d been hunting turned out to be the seemingly friendly guy next door.

As Griffin probes the two new killings, he becomes emotionally involved in various ways with the three members of the Survivors’ Club and with their families. Matters grow rapidly more complex when the College Hill Rapist strikes again, once more leaving sperm traces whose DNA matches that of the dead Como. As Griffin delves he discovers that nothing — about the crimes or about the Survivors — is as it has hitherto seemed…

This is an extremely impressive mystery-thriller, enhanced by generally excellent characterization and sense of mood. Of course, given the genre, some aspects of the story prove predictable, but these conventions serve to satisfy our expectations — which they do admirably here. Readers seeking novelty will be more than compensated by countless delightfully unexpected twists and turns of the plot. Additionally pleasing is Gardner’s willingness to be pretty tough with the reader at times, unflinchingly presenting the sheer nastiness of violent rape. She also offers a somewhat muted subtext about capital punishment.

A couple of cavils mean the book doesn’t quite get four crescents. First, the mechanism for forging those DNA matches seems very implausible. It may well be theoretically possible, but it seems so byzantine as to create a plausibility gap that even as good a writer as Gardner cannot bridge. Second, toward the end, events enter a phase of Silence of the Lambs-like melodrama. This happens as an inevitable consequence of the preceding plot — not gratuitously — but again it makes the reader’s happy suspension of disbelief difficult to maintain.

These prove, however, surprisingly minor criticisms when you’re actually reading the book. Only afterwards do they surface as discontents. All the rest of the tale-telling is so very good that you’re prepared to forgive Gardner just about any lapse as you feverishly turn the pages…

John Grant

John Grant/Paul Barnett is author of over 60 books, Consultant Editor to AAPPL and US Reviews Editor of Infinity Plus. His most recent novels are The Far-Enough Window, from BeWrite, and The Dragons of Manhattan, currently being serialized in Argosy. His collaboration with artist Bob Eggleton, Dragonhenge, nominated for a 2003 Hugo Award, was followed in 2005 by The Stardragons. His most recent major nonfiction is The Chesley Awards: A Retrospective, with Elizabeth Humphrey and Pamela D. Scoville. His story collection Take No Prisoners was released by Willowgate Press in August 2004. He has won the Hugo (twice), World Fantasy Award, Locus Award, Chesley Award, Mythopoeic Society Award, J. Lloyd Eaton Award, and a rare British Science Fiction Association Special Award. He is married to Pamela D. Scoville, Director of the Animation Art Guild; they live in New Jersey with four cats and not enough bookshelves.