Method 15/33
Shannon Kirk
Oceanview Publishing, May 2015
ISBN 978-1-60809-145-4
Hardcover
From the publisher—
Imagine a helpless, pregnant 16-year-old who’s just been yanked from the serenity of her home and shoved into a dirty van. Kidnapped…
Alone…Terrified.
Now forget her…
Picture instead a pregnant, 16-year-old, manipulative prodigy. She is shoved into a dirty van and, from the first moment of her kidnapping, feels a calm desire for two things: to save her unborn child and to exact merciless revenge.
She is methodical—calculating— scientific in her plotting. A clinical sociopath? Leaving nothing to chance, secure in her timing and practice, she waits—for the perfect moment to strike. Method 15/33 is what happens when the victim is just as cold as her abductors.
The agents searching for a kidnapped girl have their own frustrations and desires wrapped into this chilling drama. In the twists of intersecting stories, one is left to ponder. Who is the victim? Who is the aggressor?
Well, this is an odd turn of events. Just yesterday, I reviewed a book about a young woman’s fight back when she’s held captive. Today, I’m reviewing a book about a young woman’s fight back when she’s held captive. And there the comparisons end.
This time, the reason the girl has been taken is not because the usual really bad guy wants to hurt her in his own “special” ways. Sixteen-year-old Lisa is being held because she’s blonde, blue-eyed and pregnant, making her baby worth quite a premium. Ms. Kirk has taken a fairly common theme in crime fiction and given it a very interesting twist—her protagonist is almost as creepy as her captor, especially in the unnerving way she seems able to turn her emotions on and off. She’s also very clever at finding uses for odd items and, when the FBI finally arrives, they just might find the captive has gotten the better of her captors.
FBI agents Roger Lui and his partner, Lola, are interesting characters on their own merits, especially Liu with his hyperthymesia, an extremely rare condition causing him to remember his own past in great detail. As for Lisa, one might wonder if she’s a sociopath or just a very intelligent girl with an inventive mind and the ability to focus on the needs at hand without getting distracted by such unimportant things as fear or loneliness and certainly not by remorse.
Lisa is a protagonist I’m not likely to forget and I’m getting a bit tired after having two books in a row keep me up all night 😉 To say anything more would mean spoiling the things that make this book so terrific so I’ll just say…read Method 15/33 as soon as you can.
Reviewed by Lelia Taylor, July 2015.
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Watch the trailer
https://www.youtube.com/embed/qnu2LA49Spo?rel=0
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About the Author
Shannon Kirk is a practicing attorney and a law professor. She attended West Virginia Wesleyan and St. John’s Universities, is a graduate of Suffolk Law School, and was a trial lawyer in Chicago prior to moving to Massachusetts. She has been honored three times by the Faulkner Society in the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Creative Writing Competition. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband, a physicist, and their son. Method 15/33 is her first novel.
Catch Up with Ms. Kirk!
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Method 15/33 by Shannon Kirk.
The winning name will be drawn
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Open to residents of the US and Canada.
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