Reveiw & Blog Tour: Ravens by George Dawes Green

Shaw McBride and Romeo Zderko, bored with their dull jobs as telephone technical support in Ohio, decide to go on a lengthy Florida vacation. They hop in Romeo's old car and drive south. When they have a slight mechanical issue they pull off the highway and into a convenience store parking lot in a small Georgia town. Shaw goes inside and happens to overhear the clerk gossiping on the phone about someone in town having just won the lottery. The ticket was bought at that convenience store and the jackpot is more than 300 million dollars. The winner hasn't been announced yet and this information sets Shaw's brain whirling...he is on to a diabolical scheme.

The owners of the winning ticket are the Boatwright family. Mom Patsy is an alcoholic who compulsively buys lottery tickets each and every week, believing that a pile of cash will be the answer to all of their problems. Ineffectual Dad Mitch runs his own business but can't control anything at home. Daughter Tara is putting herself through college with the single goal of getting free of her bizarre mother. Son Jase is happy to sit and play video games. When they end up with a winning ticket, they are all in a blissful state of stunned disbelief in their good fortune.

Their happiness will not last long. Shaw, aided by that predator's friend MySpace, has found out all he needs to know about this family. He presents himself at their home under false pretenses and then proceeds to hold them hostage. He wants half of the jackpot and he will be on his way and no one will get hurt. By his reasoning, they should be happy to share. Half of over 300 million should be more than enough for any family. This is money they never had in the first place, why should they care if they only get half of a huge fortune? For the next week, the Boatwright family must act to the entire outside world as if everything is normal. Meanwhile, Shaw lives with them as an old family friend and Romeo cruises the town ready to start killing extended family members and friends if the Boatwrights step out of line.

I found this book to be a chilling psychological thriller with an interesting, if not completely plausible, premise. The character interactions were extremely compelling for me, I have a little knowledge of hostage behavior and the response of the hostages to form attachments to their persecutor is accurately and fascinatingly portrayed here. If you like suspense fiction, this is an absorbing tale that you won't be able to put down until the last page has been read.

I read Ravens as part of a Blog Tour, for a complete list of participating blogs, click here. Thanks to Miriam and Hachette for sending me my copy for review! For more information about the author and his books, please visit his website. You can listen to an interview with George Dawes Green on Blog Talk Radio by clicking here.

Ravens is published by Grand Central. ISBN 978-0-446-53896-1