Runner (Jane Whitefield Book 6)

I've read all of the Jane Whitefield novels from the 1st one to Runner--the 6th--in the past 2 months. How did I miss these brilliant books for so long? They're far beyond other suspense/thrillers in quality of writing, plotting, sensibility of the author, everything. Absolutely outstanding. The first 5 books were written between 1995 and 1999. Then he waited 10 years to write Runner. I'm sorry to say that he lost some momentum. Runner is still very good, but not quite up to the others. I thought that the premise was over-simplified, not very interesting, and not especially believable. And I never got a clear sense of the personality of the main character, Christine, the runner.If this is your first experience with Jane Whitefield and Thomas Perry, don't despair. Go back to the previous 5 books. I would rate all of them solid 5 stars. There are two more after Runner, and I hope that Perry got his groove back.

In the sixth book of the Jane Whitefield series, and the first one to take place after 9/11, the rules of the game have changed. The game is simple: Jane takes people out of harm's way and places them safely, far away and under another name. She promised her husband to stop, and kept her promise for several years. But when a bomb goes off in his hospital and a pregnant girl tells Jane it was meant to flush her out, Jane grabs the girl and sets out on another mission. She's older, airport security is tighter, people recognize her from long ago...the stakes are higher for Jane. The stakes are pretty high for Christine, too - she's fleeing a man who is more than just abusive, who has the money to hire half a dozen people to bring her back. Things go relatively well at first, but Christine is too young and inexperienced to see every possibility for danger and is caught. Jane has never believed in revenge, but as she has struggled with childlessness, Christine's plight triggers an empathic response and she goes all out to rescue mother and child. This isn't the best book of the series for several reasons. First, Thomas Perry retired Jane years ago. I don't know why he chose to resurrect her, but his earlier passion seems to have diminished. The details of running, hiding and building new identities are somewhat perfunctory. His interest now appears to be Jane's midlife crisis: she always thought her mother had chosen to be happy and that if she followed her mother's path, she would be happy, too. But she realizes that she has a calling that she has suppressed, and may have been hiding behind the shadow of the doctor's wife. The emphasis on her desire to be a mother doesn't really ring true. There was never any sign in the previous five books that she had any such yearning. In fact, her marriage seems more like a business arrangement than a passionate attachment. What makes this book worth reading is that the plotting is good, as always, and it's clear that Jane is back in the game. The seventh book is being released in March 2012, and it will be interesting to see if Jane finds her feet again as a guide, or realizes that part of her life is truly over.

Runner is a worthy followup to Jane Whitfield's earlier adventures, though it follows a familiar pattern, the "one last heist" type of story made popular by Al Pacino in the last Godfather movie: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!" Here, Jane has been happily and quietly married to Corey in the upstate Buffalo Triangle area in which her ancestors lived, fished, hunted, and prayed. Well, perhaps she's not so happy since, as it turns out, she has been patiently waiting for a baby of her own, but for one reason or another, the Seneca gods have shunned her pleas. Perhaps the time was ripe for her to get involved in something she thought she'd long ago paid her farewells to--the business of shielding victims from murderers. Especially with Christine Monohan, a young pregnant girl, barely out of her teens, whom a team of professional assassins has detonated a bomb in a Buffalo hospital merely to flush out.The book starts with a bang, literally, and I was prepared for it to be just as great as the first three Jane novels, but once we come to understand the lineaments of why people want Christine (and her unborn baby) so bad, it becomes a little ludicrous. Why didn't Perry just go whole hog and decide that Christine was carrying the baby of Satan? Ira Levin did it so well back in the day. Only the capture of the antichrist would justify the things the bad guys do in this novel, and no, Christine's baby is just another baby like any other, so Perry is forced to make all the bad guys into monsters nobody could actually believe in, thereby lessening the suspense a bit.The book is also too long for what it is, and driving back and forth (several times) across the US from Towananga to Rancho Santa Fe (on the Pacific) has never seemed more tedious. But, all in all, Runner proves once again that, when he puts his mind to it, Thomas Perry can write up a storm, and in addition, what we Perry fans know, Jane Whitfield is an original character with a strange, hypnotic appeal we just want more of all the time.

Jane Whitefield does not mess around, at least not usually. So why on earth does infertility seem to paralyze both her and her physician husband? That premise is weak, no way would the Jane I know and loved let some pesky little hormones outsmart her. So right away the temptation hinted at in this story does not ring true for me. Jane's task is to save a young woman and her baby from a hateful father and his very creepy parents - and she could just save the baby, right? Obviously she has to make a choice. The extreme violence, and her personal vulnerability, are shocking. As I read, I kept thinking this might be the rescue that unmasks Jane to the world....and I could not put the book down.Perry is always entertaining, and I hope that someday he revisits some of his other memorable characters (Death Benefits, Night Life, Pursuit). I would love to know how Roy Prescott is aging.....