Beneath Bone Lake
BEN EATH BON E LAKE
by Colleen Thompson
Reviewed by Jo Anne Banker
Is there anything more chilling, more horror-filled, than a mother’s fear when her child disappears?
After a year in Iraq, widow Ruby Monroe comes home to Dogwood, Texas, eager to reunite with her four-year old daughter, Zoe. The excellent salary she has earned overseas as a contract bus driver for DeserTek, a non-military sub-contractor, will allow her to complete her training as an RN and give Zoe a better life. Ruby’s sister, Misty, took care of home, hearth and Zoe, allowing Ruby take the job.
Ruby gets to the Dallas airport eager for the “the heaven of Spaghetti-Os and storybooks, and Zoe’s endless schemes to drag out tuck-ins.” But rather than experiencing the joy of her daughter’s sticky hugs and kisses, Ruby’s backpack is stolen and Misty and Zoe are no-shows. Things go downhill from there.
Sam McCoy has lived the quiet life the last two years, acting as a fishing guide on Bone Lake with his only true companion a young chocolate lab named Java. His five-year probation for the felony charge of stepping over the line as a computer hacker doesn’t call for an invisibility cloak, but Sam is lying low anyway. He figures he got lucky not having to serve time, and he’s not taking any chances.
At least not until his neighbors go missing and his foster brother’s widow, Ruby Monroe, has no one else to
turn to for help.
What follows is a complex mystery, so suspenseful and action-filled, that the reader can do nothing but grab
onto the pages and hang on for the ride.
Colleen Thompson’s Texas adventures have a reputation for being so descriptive, so powerfully written that the setting itself becomes a living character. From the West Texas desert to the city streets of Houston, Ms. Thompson immerses the reader so completely that one is on the lookout for rattlesnakes or drug dealers. Her latest will not disappoint. The dark bayou, with its stinging insects, its monster gators, and its thick vegetation that can trap like quicksand, will have you gasping for breath and fighting against the feeling of being dragged down, down, down – Beneath Bone Lake.
