Rating: 
Summary: very good, effective thriller
Review: Walter Demming - bus driver and Vietnam vet - and eleven schoolkids have been incarcerated in an underground hole for forty six days. They are the hostages of a biazarre fundamentalist cult, kidnapped at gunpoint whilst driving along the road to school. The leader of the cult - who call themselves the Hearth Jezreelites - is the charismatic Samuel Mordecai, the terrifying self-proclaimed Prophet, and every day the captives must endure his garbled religious sermons and rants on the evils of modern life. He has taken them for a very specific and ominous reason, in preparation for the coming Apocalypse, which he foretells will arrive in just five days time.After 46 days, the negotiations have reached a dead-lock. Mordecai will not even listen, let alone concede anything, and he threatens to kill the hostages if even one person steps onto Jezreeelite soil. It is now that crime reporter Molly Cates enters the scenario. She interviewed Mordecai once before and did not like the experience at all. Now, if she can possibly unearth more about Mordecai's past that the FBI can use as a lever in the negotiations, she may well be their last remaining hope. But she does have just five days time... This is an excellent thriller. There's nothing particularly wonderful about Willis Walker's prose-style - it tends towards the pedestrian, the very normal; it certainly doesn't sing - or anything riveting about protagonist Molly Cates - she is real and human, but there isn't a great deal save from her humanity and stubbornness to make her stand out from many other gutsy female protagonists - but this is still one terrific thriller, which definitely deserves to be more widely read. It's intelligent and though-provoking (but not too much) and tackles well issues of religion and faith and religious mania, as well as having some snappy dialogue and a cracker of a plot. It marries three elements absolutely brilliantly: cults, hostage negotiating, and good old investigating. The Prophet Samuel Mordecai is a particularly delicious villain, chilling and, of course, mad, as well as having a brilliant name. Mordecai. Mordecai. My, i could just roll that one about on my tongue for ages. Isn't it just great? Anyway...Under the Beetle's Cellar is a tense, suspenseful thriller with a dramatic and moving conclusion that does not disappoint. In terms of plot, you'll notice that this book is strikingly similar to Jeffery Deaver's brilliant A Maiden's Grave, (group of children of a bus kidnapped and held hostage), which was published in the same year. But, this book still retains some very original, different elements which make it another must-read thriller.
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