Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #33433 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-08
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Glasgow Herald, July 29, 2006
`[an] edge-of-the-seat thriller'

Bookseller, September 1, 2006
`A break-through thriller with staying power'

Michael Connolly
`Panic is a ride down the roaring rapids. Jeff Abbott has put
together a hell of a page turner'

Customer Reviews

Great job.
This is the first book I've read by Jeff Abbott and I have to say that I enjoyed it immensly! The book is anything but boring. I couldn't put it down.In fact I barely did!

Writing decent thrillers is harder than it looks
I read the negative reviews of this book, but the optimist in me thought the book can't be that bad. After all, the book was recommended by Harlan Coben and Lee Child, the author has had other books published and the plot sounded promising: Evan Casher receives an urgent phone call from his mother summoning him home. When he gets there, he finds her murdered and a hitman lying in wait for him. Then he realises that his entire life has been a lie and that he is in terrible danger.

Sadly, the premise is about the only thing going for this book. It just goes to show that writing decent thrillers is harder than it looks. It requires more than simply keeping the action going. You need to have a plot that makes at least partial sense and which is credible enough to allow the reader to suspend disbelief. You need to have some sympathy for the lead character and give the other characters reasons to be there. You need to build up the tension so that the reader wants to keep reading. None of those elements are there in "Panic".

It felt like Jeff Abbott had dissected some Harlan Coben novels and thought: "Right, I need a hero who finds out that his life is based on a lie. I'll give him a girlfriend with a mysterious secret and throw in an uber bad guy who wants something from him. I'll make sure he doesn't know who he can trust. That'll work!" And maybe in a ten page synopsis to the publisher, it did. But what eventuates is a convoluted mess that feels extremely formulaic, where plot "twists" are so predictable that the only suspense is in guessing how many pages it will take until they are revealed. I don't recommend this book at all.

A plausible page turner
An intelligent read with a plausible story...it's always a plus if you can actually believe the plot. Sometimes with the kind of thriller (book or film) where the main character doesn't know where to turn, I find myself getting frustrated as they continually make the wrong decisions but that doesn't happen here.

Evan is thrown into confusion when his mother is murdered and he very nearly suffers the same fate. The author successfully portrays Evan's confusion at not knowing who to trust...when the people closest to you don't appear to have been who you thought they were and your life is in serious danger, how do you decide who to believe?

I liked the characters, and I also liked the fact that the author wasn't afraid to dispense with some of the good guys along the way.