Ordeal

A woman overcomes her violence-filled past to save her family and stop a band of paramilitary survivalists in a taut hardcover debut from veteran paperback suspense novelist Mills (Love Me Not, 1995). High-school chemistry teacher Wren Cameron seems like a typical wife and mother in a small Texas town, and she and her attorney husband have tried to be loving parents to their two children, 12-year-old Zoe and 15-year-old Daniel. Nearly 20 years earlier, however, a naive, teenaged Wren had gone underground after the FBI raided the compound in which she lived with her first love, the charismatic militia leader Jeremiah Hunter, who was arrested during the raid and thrown into prison. Wren thought she had erased all traces of the past, but now a vengeful Hunter, out on parole, kidnaps her and Daniel, taking them to an armed desert camp somewhere in the Southwest. Hunter demands that Wren draw on her knowledge of chemical explosives to build a bomb to blow up a Texas office building. Instead, she draws on the wisdom of her Cherokee grandmother, and tries to outmaneuver the militiamen and bring Hunter down. Mills provides fascinating, well-researched descriptions of militia camps, outlining the paranoid thinking that has fostered their creation. Despite some boilerplate writing and a too tidy ending, a fast-moving plot, infusions of Cherokee culture and vivid characters drive the action as Mills explores the sordid reality behind the Oklahoma bombing headlines. (May)