Nameless Night

Categories: Mystery & Suspense , Fiction

G. M. Ford’s Leo Waterman and Frank Corso mystery series are good stuff.  Here he branches out on a stand-alone thriller. 

As Nameless Night opens, we meet Paul Hardy, a brain-damaged John Doe who was discovered next to a railroad car and has been living in a Seattle group home for the past seven years.  Now surgery for a second brain injury in a car accident has strangely resurrected parts of his memory.  Not, unfortunately, knowledge of his own identity, though he remembers a name that was important to him for some reason.

Who is he?  Why are government agents pounding on the door as soon as the group home's director googles the name Paul remembers?

The name turns out to be that of a NASA engineer.  Paul decides that he has to get to Florida to meet the man.  As he travels across the country, accepting help from a street kid and a young woman he rescued in a bar fight, he finds that he's just one step ahead of shadowy figures (are they really from the government?) who want to find him.

Yet when he reaches the Florida address of the engineer, he finds a family peacefully living there.  No mystery at all, apparently. 

The classic suspense plot of a man being hunted for reasons he doesn't understand gets a good workout here.  I can picture this as a Hitchcockian movie.