Thursday, July 5, 2018

Surface Tension by Mike Mullin

Jake loves being on his bike. He lives for it. He is an amateur competitive cyclist and is hoping to make the USA team and go to Belgium. Jake also has a beautiful girlfriend. So his life is pretty good. Until...

Jake is riding one morning on what are normally deserted roads when he encounters a group of tanker trucks. It is his misfortune that the trucks are part of a terrorist attack that brings down an airplane leaving the nearby airport. Without giving too much away, let's just say that Jake wakes up in the hospital with no memory of what happened.

Betsy's life is pretty good, too. Her mother disappeared along time ago, but her dad has given her goals. She wants to become the first female member of the Sons of Paine, a patriotic group who want to make the United States a better place. Her dad is an important member and gives her a task to prove herself - killing the only witness to the plane crash, a guy about her age named Jake who managed to escape.

The author has written a suspenseful tale of a young man who is in danger at almost every turn. The terrorists want him dead, and the FBI wants him for questioning. It becomes difficult for Jake to know who he can trust. And since so many people think his head injury is causing him to hallucinate or remember things that never happened, no one really trusts him.

We also get the viewpoint of Betsy, a young women who has grown up learning to hate Muslims and thinks nothing of killing innocent people for the end goal of finally eradicating them from the United States. But all is not what it seems even for a young women willing to commit terrorism.

A bonus for me is that this story is set in Indianapolis and mentions many places. I know the city well, so I enjoyed having the characters go to so many specific locations.

For more info, check out the Indianapolis Public Library catalog and the author's site.

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