Description:
Penzler Pick, April 2002: The second novel by Baine Kerr is, like his first, Harmful Intent, a densely plotted thriller with the threads of the story meandering here and there, the author apparently in no hurry to get to the crux of his story. It is a device that, in the hands of a less talented writer, might frustrate the reader, but here it is a pleasure to go along for the ride during which a richly textured story infolds. It begins on December 25, 1993, in Laramie, Wyoming. June Mooney, the only female engineer at the train yard, has signed up for duty on Christmas Day because her daughter is with June's ex. Dale Stillwell, a loner, has also signed up for duty. In the middle of a raging blizzard, June is in the trailing cab of a locomotive, steering it through the yard while Dale hangs off the lead engine checking switches and giving the go ahead. As June's engine starts down a line to a spur, an outbound coal train stands in the cutoff. Dale is straining to see through the snow and, as he glimpses the cowcatchers of the coal train close in with 6 inches to spare, he clambers up the rungs of his engine, misses one, loses his hold, and slips between the trains. He is rolled and then dropped with two collapsed lungs, 11 broken bones, and a bolt jammed into his skull. June never saw a thing. This story is told by Elliott Stone, the court-appointed conservator for Dale Stillwell in the matter of Stillwell vs. The Western Pacific Railroad. As conservator, Elliott is making sure the financial settlement being hammered out between the lawyers for each side is fair. June is there, but now she's June Stillwell, having married Dale and devoted her life to nursing him. June reminds Elliott of his wife who, two years earlier, died unexpectedly. Elliott doesn't really want this job, but he is persuaded to take the case by Stillwell's doctor, Hans Leitner. Elliott owes Leitner a favor for getting him an appointment in The Hague to join the prosecutor's office at the United Nations criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. The settlement is agreed upon and Elliott can leave for Europe but, as he leaves the courthouse, he overhears Dale Stillwell muttering over and over "I'm going to k-kill her!" Two years pass and Elliott returns to discover that June Stillwell is in the Colfax Center for Rehabilitation with other hopeless patients after being brutally attacked in her bed by person or persons unknown and with an object which nobody can identify. The stage is set. When a series of deaths occur at the Colfax Center, Elliott is in a unique position to connect the deaths at Colfax with European war crimes--and that connection is shocking. --Otto Penzler
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