Don't Say a Word

by Andrew Klavan

published

April 1991 by Pocket Books

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binding

Hardcover, 310 pages

isbn

0671740083 (isbn13: 9780671740085)

description

They're watching.They've wiretapped the apartment.They've got their daughter.They told them they'd hurt her if they spoke about it.They told them, &qu...more

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Loren rated it:

(review of isbn 0765341522)

09/16/08

Read in August, 2008

From ISawLightningFall.com

Having been made into a movie starring Michael Douglas, Don’t Say A Word could be called Andrew Klavan’s best-known work. It’s also a work that pinpoints every parent’s worst fear and gives it a good hammering. Dr. Nathan Conrad -- dubbed Psychologist of the Damned for his willingness to take on difficult cases -- awakes one morning to find that his daughter Jessica isn’t in her bed. Then comes the phone call. A stranger on the other end says that, yes, he...more From ISawLightningFall.com

Having been made into a movie starring Michael Douglas, Don’t Say A Word could be called Andrew Klavan’s best-known work. It’s also a work that pinpoints every parent’s worst fear and gives it a good hammering. Dr. Nathan Conrad -- dubbed Psychologist of the Damned for his willingness to take on difficult cases -- awakes one morning to find that his daughter Jessica isn’t in her bed. Then comes the phone call. A stranger on the other end says that, yes, he has Jessica and he’ll give her back -- if Conrad can pry a number from the head of a violent schizophrenic. He has until 9 p.m. The clock, as they say, is ticking.

I don’t know what I was expecting from the book. Klavan is an interesting breed of writer, a Jewish Christian with staunchly conservative convictions. But none of that ideology turns up here. (To be fair, his religious and political viewpoints seem a recent development, and Don’t Say A Word was published in 1991). Neither do any particularly well-rounded characters. The novel’s inhabitants are flatter than microfiche, which is fine for fables but not for more-or-less realistic works. Also absent is a winning prose style. The proceedings are wordily narrated, with chunks of text italicized and repeated to convey emotional import, while a hearty sprinkling of profanity attempts to add punch.

The novel excels at one point, though, and I don’t mean that as a left-handed compliment. Fortunes have been built on a single excellence, and Klavan frames his novel on a solid foundation of suspense. Adhering to Hitchcock’s old dictum that “whenever possible the public must be informed,” he tells you everything. He tells you of Conrad’s frail physical and mental condition, of Jessica’s helpless terror, of the schizophrenic’s scrambled sense of reality, of a monstrous villain’s sick sadism. Most of all, as the story runs he tells you about time, which is always in short supply and ever-decreasing. The result is an almost unbearable climax that spikes your heart rate and nails you to your chair. Klavan might not do all things well, but when he succeeds he does so mightily. That’s enough to make stop at the “K” section of the bookshelf the next time I’m looking to while away a weekend....less

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