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Summary
Summary
A mysterious woman bearing a human skull and a terrifying story draws Texas forensic artist Paul Bern into a conspiracy involving a clandestine U.S. intelligence operation in Mexico City's underworld.
Author Notes
David Lindsey is a highly-acclaimed, best-selling author of suspense fiction. Lindsey was born in Kingsville, Texas on November 6, 1944. He spent his childhood in the Texas Rio Grande Valley and in West Texas, near San Angelo. He graduated from North Texas State University with a degree in English literature. Lindsey's chilling page-turners are read around the world. Whether writing about serial killers or undercover agents, gutsy, gory thrillers are his trademark.
"A Cold Mind" (1983) introduced Houston police detective Stuart Haydon and a serial killer using the rabies virus as a murder weapon. Other popular books featuring Haydon include "Heat From Another Sun" (1984) and "Spiral" (1986). Female detective Carmen Palma is the protagonist of "Mercy" (1990). This book is a tale told with such horror that it has been compared to "Silence Of The Lambs". Some of Lindsey's works have been made into films, most notably "Requiem for a Glass Heart" (1996) starring Demi Moore. He has worked as a freelance editor and is the founder of Heidelberg Publishers.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Forensic artist Paul Bern uses his impressive talents as a sculptor to reconstruct a face on an anonymous skull brought to him under mysterious circumstances in Lindsey's latest in a long line of expertly constructed thrillers (The Rules of Silence, etc.). The more Paul works on the skull, the more he's convinced that there's something distinctly disturbing about the emerging features. Soon after he figures it out (long after the reader has done so), he finds himself caught up in a murky world of spies, smugglers and international terrorism. Forced to abandon his idyllic central Texas home, he travels to Mexico City, where he must impersonate his own, recently murdered, CIA agent twin brother. Heavy Rain is the code name of the mission; the purpose is to capture or kill the world's most feared terrorist, Ghazi Baida. There's a beautiful agent, Susana Mejia, and the usual collection of Mexican hoods, but the real showstopper is Vicente Mondragon, a man whose entire face has been removed in a drug vendetta, leaving him with nothing more than exposed muscle, bone, gristle, protruding lips and a naked pair of googly eyes. This horror is kept antiseptic by a thin transparent membrane that Vicente must spritz at regular intervals. The novel's suspense lies in Paul's ongoing efforts to maintain his identity as his own brother and at the same time attempt to uncover Baida's terror plan. The plot is deftly handled, the characters are sharp and memorable, there's a shocker twist at the end and the background information on faces, or the lack thereof, is fascinating. Agent, Aaron Priest Literary Agency. (Apr. 20) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
The one about the civvie who stands in for his CIA twin and earns the thanks of a grateful nation. Paul Bern resurrects faces after terrible damage has been done to them. He's a forensic artist, a good one. And a very quiet one: a widower with no family and a few good friends living contentedly in Austin, Texas. Not much in the tea leaves suggests the imminence of change, so when an attractive young woman carrying a hatbox-sized cardboard container shows up at his studio, Paul is only professionally curious. When she opens the container, he's impressed mostly by the fact that the skull he sees inside is in better shape than those that usually come his way. But equanimity is about to take permanent leave from Paul. Work isn't far along when he realizes, disconcertingly, that the face materializing on his drawing board is his own. Well, not quite. Soon enough, a gut-wrenching phone call confirms the idea already half-formed in his mind. Paul had known for years, of course, that he was adopted. What he hadn't known, until the call from Vincente Mondragón, is that he has a twin. That is, had a twin, he's told by Mondragón, since CIA super-agent Jude Lerner, Paul's brother, has been brutally murdered. This is a calamity of major proportions, not merely for the CIA (and rather incidentally for Paul) but for the country, so vital to US interests is the operation to which Jude was key. What Paul is asked to do next will leave him in a state of quivering surprise--a state unlikely to be shared by any seasoned reader. Old pro Lindsey (The Rules of Silence, 2003, etc.) does his best to keep things twisty, but that well-traveled-road feeling is hard to shake. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Paul Bern, a forensic artist, has a fascinating job: re-creating the facial features of homicide or accident victims. But his job gets even more fascinating when a woman shows up at his door with a skull in a bag. She believes it's the remains of her husband, and she wants Paul to confirm her suspicion. Paul soon learns some things about himself that shock him, and in no time he's railroaded by the U.S. government into helping them ferret out a group of terrorists in South America. This is a troublesome novel from a brand-name thriller author. Its plot is needlessly far-fetched (you can feel Lindsey struggling to justify putting his fish-out-of-water protagonist into the places the plot requires him to be). Its characters are thin, and Alice, the 17-year-old girl whose cognitive disconnect allows her to sense when someone is lying, belongs in a different novel altogether (perhaps something by Deanoontz, who knows what to do with this kind of character). The prose is workmanlike, for the most part, although the final chapter contains some of the worst writing of the year. Although Lindsey has a large fan base, and he has written some good novels, this is not one of them. It will sell, but finishing it--even for his keenest fans--will be an act of sheer willpower. --David Pitt Copyright 2004 Booklist
