A few weeks ago, Sarah McClain contacted me to ask if I would read and review her new novel FOR RANSOM. It was presented as a Christian suspense mystery, which sounded interesting to me, so I offered to read it.

In FOR RANSOM, eighteen-year-old Hailey Bennett is kidnapped and held for ransom. Her bodyguard and boyfriend, Eli, works to beat the clock in order to find her. Her father is a distant and preoccupied British government official who appears to know more about her abduction than he is letting on. Her mother is sincere and caring and willing to do whatever she can to get Hailey back.

This story read very quickly for me — I finished it in a few hours. The storyline centered around Hailey’s abduction and her rescue. While I liked the characters of Hailey and Eli, and found them plucky and courageous, I had some problems with the other characters. Hailey’s mother Anne was very one dimensional to me. Her father was even more one dimensional – in fact I couldn’t get into his head at all and found him almost a caricature. I would have liked to have seen more development of these two. I think it would have made them more believable to me.

I like the idea of “Christian suspense” as a genre. The main characters of Hailey and Eli had great faith and used it to get them through the hard times. The book could be considered less violent than other mysteries, though I thought it had some pretty serious physical stuff in it. Poor Hailey gotten beaten repeatedly by her captors and I found that disturbing.

I thank Sarah for sending me a galley of her novel. Best of luck with it!