NOT OUR DAUGHTER

A couple who already abandoned their life a dozen years ago have to go on the lam once again, all because of their daughter.

Long frustrated in their attempts to bear a child, Greg and Amy Olsen think their luck has changed when they foster Candace McGee’s newborn daughter. They’re right, but not in the way they expected. The night the court unexpectedly awards custody of the baby to Candace, she turns up at their door covered in blood. Moments after warning them to flee the unknown powers who’ve targeted her and her daughter, she dies, marking Greg as such an obvious suspect that he takes off with Amy and baby Marcy. Thirteen years pass, and things seem quiet. The fugitives have made a new life in Colorado as Cole, Lisa, and Jade Shipley, until Cole’s withdrawal of a substantial sum from a Cayman Islands account to treat Jade’s scoliosis triggers a new FBI manhunt for them. Even worse, the person who killed Candace somehow turns up on their trail again. Cole, whose background in banking security and fraud makes him an ideal candidate to vanish, packs up his family in a trice and hightails it once more, followed by FBI agent Mark Burns, who happens to have a fractious 13-year-old daughter of his own, and the real killer. Zunker pulls all the stops out in keeping the chase moving like greased lightning. And if you feel that the final movement is a bit of an anticlimax, well, it’s hard to imagine how it could have maintained that tension till the last page.

Routine but highly professional thrills perfect for travel reading, preferably when you’re not being pursued by the FBI.