City of the Sun

Categories: Mystery & Suspense , Fiction

Twelve-year-old Jamie Gabriel gets on his bike to run his morning paper route in the Indianapolis suburbs.  He never comes home.

 

If you can keep reading past that gut-wrenching premise, keep reading.  David Levien’s debut novel, City of the Sun, keeps tightening the suspense from there.

 

Jamie’s parents, Paul and Carol, spend a year anxiously following the police case on their son while their marriage falls to ashes and the case turns cold.  Then a sympathetic patrolman passes them the name of a private investigator.  Though they’ve already tried two, Paul finally makes the contact with p.i. Frank Behr.  Behr is reluctant to take the case, as the odds of finding any information (much less the boy himself) are so remote.  But Paul doesn’t know that the case has a hook that Behr can’t pull away from:  Behr’s own son died at the age of seven.

So Behr takes the case and begins the slow, patient process of picking up the old, old traces of evidence, going through the steps for the sake of another grief-stricken father.  And once he stands in the spot where he has been able to deduce that Jamie met his fate, he can’t stop.  He can’t deny Paul the chance to track the villains responsible, either.  It’s a long and horrifying trail.

 

Levien is a screenwriter with several successful movies under his belt, so he knows how to work his material.  Experienced fans of the genre will be able to predict some of the plots turns, but they’ll certainly follow every twist—no one’s going to be putting this one down halfway through.