Moving further away from the restraints of straight Christian fiction toward the mainstream has done Ted Dekker good; BONEMAN’S DAUGHTERS might be his most gripping thriller yet. If you can finish it, that is — those with aversions to children in peril and the act of breaking bones will find it difficult to stomach.
Ryan Evans is a military intelligence officer whose troop is sabotaged while in Iraq. When he returns to consciousness, a man named Kahlid wants revenge for his children being killed by American intervention. He intended to extract it by presenting Ryan with a choice: Either kill an innocent child with a sledgehammer on video for all the world to see, or give up the whereabouts of his own wife and daughter so Kahlid can do the same to them.
This opening is intense, and mind you, the real plot hasn’t yet come to roost. That involves a serial killer known as The BoneMan (what’s with the uppercase M?), so named for his breaking the bones — but not the skin — of his seven young female victims, all of whom died of internal bleeding. It’s been two years since the BoneMan’s last kidnapping, presumably because he’s behind bars.
But shaky evidence leads to his springing from prison, and soon, because of what happened to Ryan in Iraq, the BoneMan not only pursues Ryan’s shallow bitch of a wife and his estranged teen daughter, but authorities believe that Ryan might be the killer himself.
He’s not, of course, but good luck proving that when BoneMan subjects him to a seven-day, cross-country game in order to safe the life of his girl — one who no longer even cares about him.
With a villain obsessed with Noxzema, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS immediately springs to mind, grafted onto the father/daughter dynamic of the film TAKEN. Dekker’s novel, intended or not, utilizes the strongest elements of each. It also takes the single most cringe-worthy scene from MISERY and replays it dozens of times. This is Dekker going for, er, broke.
He spends the first quarter of BONEMAN’S DAUGHTERS setting up his story with care, as if it were a gym floor full of dominoes, and then slyly gives it a nudge to watch them all fall down. He saves a major twist for late in the show — however implausible — all building to a gruesome climax.
Dekker being Dekker, biblical metaphors are woven throughout, but at no time is Christianity used as a story crutch. (In other words, the war isn’t won through a prayer.) The novel benefits from Ryan being a deeply flawed protagonist, blurring the lines a bit between its good ol’ good-and-evil setup. —Rod Lott
OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• HOUSE by Frank Peretti and Ted Dekker
• SAINT by Ted Dekker
• SKIN by Ted Dekker
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What’s wrong with me that the only thing I found frightening in this review was the phrase “straight Christian fiction”?