The Panic Zone
A Jack Gannon Mystery
Rick Mofina
Review: Following up on a lead from a terrorist attack in Brazil is just the first step for investigative reporter Jack Gannon that will take him on an international adventure across four continents in The Panic Zone, the second mystery in this series by Rick Mofina.
Though Gannon was a seasoned investigative reporter in his native Buffalo, he's a novice when it comes to the world stage. Relatively new at the New York City headquarters of World Press Alliance (WPA), and anxious to make his mark, he jumps at the chance to follow-up on a bombing in Brazil that claimed the lives of two WPA staff, a reporter and a photographer. Travelling to Rio de Janeiro, he is met with resistance by both his local colleagues, who resent his intruding presence as a corporate overseer, and the authorities, who view him as an interfering outsider. Still, with sharp eyes and quick thinking, he's able to pick up on a few clues as to why the reporter and photographer were at that particular cafe at that particular time when the bomb exploded ... and the start to the story of his career.
Readers will likely have to exercise some patience in reading The Panic Zone. The sheer number of characters and locations is overwhelming as is the fact that the (at least initially) numerous concurrent storylines are seemingly unrelated and have no common elements. A cheat sheet to keep everything straight is practically a necessity. And it doesn't pay to start asking the "why"- and "why not"-type of questions that will naturally arise along the way; just go along for the ride. It takes quite a long time -- well into the second half the book -- for the disparate subplots to begin to come together, and even then, there's no sense of accomplishment. It's rather disappointing, since there are many individual scenes in this book that are quite well done, yet the overall picture doesn't come together in a completely satisfactory manner. The Panic Zone isn't a poor thriller by any means, just more of an unnecessarily complicated one.
Acknowledgment: Planned Television Arts provided a copy of The Panic Zone for this review.
Review Copyright © 2010 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
Location(s) referenced in The Panic Zone: Wyoming, New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Washington DC, The Bahamas, Morocco
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The Panic Zone by Rick Mofina
Publisher: Mira Books
Format: Mass Market Paperback
ISBN-10: 0-7783-2794-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-7783-2794-3
Publication Date: July 2010
List Price: $9.99
Synopsis (from the publisher): A car crashes in Wyoming: A young mother is thrown clear of the devastating car crash. Dazed, she sees a figure pull her infant son from the flames. Or does she? The police believe it's a case of trauma playing cruel tricks on the mind, until the night the grief-stricken woman hears a voice through the phone: "Your baby is alive."
A bomb explodes in a Rio de Janeiro café: The heinous act kills ten people, including two journalists with the World Press Alliance news agency. Jack Gannon's first international assignment is to find out whether his colleagues were innocent victims or targets who got too close to a huge story.
A Caribbean cruise ends in horror: Doctors are desperate to identify the mysterious cause of a cruise ship passenger's agonizing death. They turn to the world's top scientists, who fear that someone has resurrected their long-buried secret research. Research that is now being used as a deadly weapon.
With millions of lives at stake, experts work frantically against time. And as an anguished mother searches for her child and Jack Gannon pursues the truth, an unstoppable force hurls them all into the panic zone.
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