The Timer Game
by Susan Arnout Smith
Published by St. Martin’s Minotaur
Click on book
cover to order
at Amazon.com
Reviewed by Kathy Perschmann
Smith has been a playwright, and an essayist for National Public Radio. She lives in San Diego, California, the setting of The Timer Game. The book’s web site had some innovative “webisodes” covering events that happened five years before the book begins, and it is unique way to get to know the characters and what has shaped them.
Grace Descanso works as a crime-scene technician in San Diego, California. She is a struggling single mother of five-year-old Katie. Her best friend is her AA sponsor, Jeanne. Grace had been a promising pediatric heart surgeon, when she suddenly quit medicine and went through a horrific struggle with alcohol. The event that triggered this change happened when she was working in a tiny clinic in Guatemala, over five years ago.
Grace is called to a crime scene on her day off. At the crime scene, a meth house with blood spatters, she follows a cop and another crime scene investigator out back. There she finds them with their throats slit–dead. The deranged murderer attacks her, and she grabs one of the fallen men’s guns and kills him. Before she does, however he delivers a chilling message, “He’s after you, Grace, the Spikeman. You better run.” Grace is put on administrative leave.
She is celebrating Katie’s fifth birthday, trying to keep her life normal, when odd things start happening. A package appears in the backyard. Who brought it? It has a bloody doll inside. Then Katie is taken from the upstairs bathroom, and Grace is forced to play “the timer game” to find her. This is a variation of the timer game she plays with her daughter, depositing clues around the house and using a timer to keep track of the time it takes to solve the clues. Only this timer game covers the city, using strangers to hold various packages for Grace if she solves the clues in time. She is not allowed to call the police, and the Spikeman seems to know her every move–he seems to know Grace very well.
Will she find Katie in time? What could she have done in the past to cause someone to hate her so much?
Armchair Interview says: This edge-of-the-chair thriller will keep you up until you finish it.