One to Go

 

One to Go by Mike Pace  365 pages

Tom Booker is in a hurry to pick up his daughter from her mother’s. Not only has he promised to take her to the Air and Space Museum, but if he doesn’t show up reasonably soon, he will catch seven kinds of grief from his ex-wife.

As he is crossing Memorial Bridge, he is texting his ex-wife. His car drifts into on-coming traffic and as it crashes into a mini-van, he realizes that his daughter, three of her friends, and his ex-sister-in-law are the van’s occupants.  When he awakens, the crash site has frozen in time. A young, yuppie couple approach Tom to make a deal. They will rewind time and let his daughter live, but he must agree to provide five souls, one every two weeks, in exchange for the van’s occupants to live. 

Tom quickly agrees, not fully understanding what he has committed to do. When he awakes again, he feels what happened was a hallucination. Only when his ex-sister-in-law is brutally murdered does he realize what he has done. He isn’t a killer and doesn’t even know how to go about planning a murder, much less four more.

Tom’s moral quagmire is at the heart of this fast-paced, absorbing novel. I was on the edge of my seat from the opening scene to the last page. Author Pace could have gotten away with having only four occupants in the as by the time the fourth soul was delivered to Satan’s representatives, Tom’s quandaries were starting to get a bit predictable. Some nice twists at the end involving a priest made for a satisfying ending.

I do have two things to criticize. First is the cover. The dust jacket gives the appearance that the book is to a legal thriller, but that’s far from the case. If I had seen the book in a bookstore, I probably would have passed. Yeah, I judge a book by its cover. Second is the genre. The dust jacket is lists the genre as thriller but it’s more paranormal suspense or supernatural than thriller.

Still, One to Go was a heart-stopping read, that I would give six out of five star, if I could. Highly recommend it.