cover image MORTAL STRAIN

MORTAL STRAIN

W. H. Watford, . . Pinnacle, $6.99 (400pp) ISBN 978-0-7860-1467-5

This leaden thriller drags its feet for 300 pages, but when the pace finally picks up, the reader's patience is far from rewarded. Convinced that his father's death was murder and not suicide, as the authorities claim, Dr. Jack Harris takes a job at the private Atlanta prison where his father died. On the first day of work, Jack and a guard are taken hostage during a prison breakout. The guard is killed, but Jack is left alive. With virtually no motivation, the prison warden and the police decide that Jack must have been an accomplice, and he soon finds himself caught between the cops and Richardson, the mysterious mogul who runs the prison. The thriller's premise strains disbelief, the characterizations are thin and the writing is often overwrought ("There were things opening in him since his father's death, things he didn't want to deal with. Things that wouldn't stay silent anymore"). In addition, the medical description here ranges from the badly metaphorical ("His tongue felt like a piece of wood stuck in a bed of dull pain ") to the turgidly clinical. Anyone who's read a medical thriller in the last 10 years will know right away what's going on in the prison. That in itself isn't a flaw, but in this case, there's no pleasure in the inevitable cat-and-mouse chase to the climatic confrontation. (Oct.)