"Amanda Search" by Isabel Allende

Whenever the full moon lights, he strikes, the ruthless serial killer who desecrates with perfidious rituals the bodies of his victims. The guard Ed Staton found fourth graders in the morning in the gym of their school, as he lay dead on the pommel horse, his backside exposed, in the handle of a baseball bat. Doris and Michael constant a discovered a neighbor dead in their marriage beds; with a Bunsen burner the killer branding had left on her buttocks. The psychiatrist Richard Ashton he had gagged and bound, then electrocution to hunt through the body and cut with a scalpel a swastika in the chest.

What drives these people? Who did this monster chosen for his next action? What are the links between the victims, who may finally allow conclusions about the perpetrators?

While the police in San Francisco under the direction of Enddreißigers Bob Martin still rather be in the dark, an unusual group takes young citizens of the case, which have come together in a role-playing game on the Internet.

They deal virtually with the secrets to Jack the Ripper, and now want the real killer to track down.

“Ripper” are names of the six young people who spread around the globe in front of their PCs squat and to make an appointment to video conferencing. Their leader and GM’s Bob Martín’s seventeen year old daughter Amanda Martin, highly intelligent, independent and confident, vegetarian and avid reader with a passion for Scandinavian crime fiction.

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So far, she has not given much attention to what their exalted godmother Celeste Roko her and each speaking unto all conscience, having consulted the stars and horoscopes has created. As a child, Amanda ballet lessons received instead of the longed Skateboards, just because the stars the offer. But something’s got to be something to Auntie’s prophecies that proclaimed the population every morning before the weather report on television. will they had announced weeks earlier that a bloodbath over San Francisco befall.

What a promising plot for a suspenseful thriller featuring original staff! “Amanda’s search” is Isabel Allende debut in this genre. As she reveals in her thanksgiving at the end of the novel, she wanted the story originally “four hands” with her husband Willie Gordon, an attorney and author of crime fiction, writing, then left but on the difficult projects, could easily break in the marriage.

So Allende has concentrated on their own skills. The well-known love of detail, catchy narrative style inspired the classic Allende worshipers. The thriller fan will, however, on the more than three hundred pages long and no sign of thrill rob his breath.

Countless figures are presented to the readers, including (except Amanda and her grandfather) not how they made its average circle knows. Each in this Panopticon is strange in its own way, physically maimed, psychologically disturbed or in character. Amanda’s playgroup is virtually occupied representative:

• A boy is paraplegic since an accident and is in a wheelchair
• Another is so tormented by fears that he lives lonely and alone in his room for two years and it only. leaves to the toilet visit.
• a nineteen year old suffering from bulimia.
• a thirteen-year-old African-American orphan boy living in an institute for gifted children.

Amanda is a child of divorce. After puberty skyrocketed, she has become accustomed to a shuffling gait, and wearing clothes from second-hand shop. Their free weekends she spends alternately mother Indiana or Father Bob. Loves his pretty daughter, trusted her, she lets in the police files read, heed their advice. But he is incapable of binding and every 28 days plunges into a new relationship. When he impregnated Amanda’s mother, then the “walking innocence” of high school, he was a demon who lost in the noise of love, alcohol, drugs.

Mama Indiana, 33, is in the hippy era stuck and blond mane, excessive tortuosity almost “mob boss-lover to the rather strange sensuality of Chicago from movies of the sixties,” recalls her “sweeping sopranos bosom” a cartoon. Your helper syndrome forcing the spiritual Samaritan, each Unlucky that crosses their way to provide assistance. Some money she earns as a “healer … in office eight … famous Holistic Clinic ” where a lot of patients to benefit from their talents, “Intuitive Massage, Reiki, magnet, crystal, aromatherapy”. hopes to one of its clients, its tension and spasms solve them is Navy Seal Ryan Miller, deeply traumatized from Afghanistan and leg amputated. This accumulation of biographies full of injuries, scares and constraints, a critical portrait of the US shimmers in the fight against evil in the interior and in the world through.

But decided really the author is not, whether a intends to produce thriller, a social study, a portrait of youth, a media criticism or just entertainment. For one the thrill is missing, for the other the sharpness. On one hand, reminds one of the characters, victims of female genital mutilation in Africa, more than evident in the case of Waris Dirie, human rights activist and UN Special Ambassador of Somali origin, which raises the bar of the serious ambitions high; On the other hand give so many strange freaks the doorknob in his hand, making it easy to marvel, if not just to make you smile; which in turn leaves some serious approach appear as mere grandstanding.

True master craftsmanship demonstrates the seasoned writer when she (with already well advanced action) Amanda’s mother can fall into the hands of psychopaths. As tension and pace of the novel turn on properly, there is a race against time. All the previously finely spun threads and many figures adds the author voices together.

Conclusion

Isabel Allende first crime novel is worth reading because it maintains entertaining and original, but neither plot nor literary claim rich in the qualities of their debut work , the legendary world bestseller “the Haunted house” approach. “Amanda’s search” could no less than pass as youth book, is still at the core of a modern version of the old pattern “Brave daughter with good friends save her mom.” Do not worry: The cruel murder details are only named, not spread to Scandinavian way until reading hurts.