Sam is home on a Sunday morning when their house is attacked by shooters in an SUV. He rushes upstairs to Jimmy’s room as soon as the bullets stop flying. Maggie is driving to Mass at church when emergency vehicles pass her. She makes an immediate U-turn and rushes home. She confronts Sam. “Jimmy. He’s gone. He’s gone, isn’t he?”

Before the police can question Maggie, she disappears leaving a note behind for Sam that explains she has gone in search of Jimmy, asking that he trust her. He tears their room apart. He finds a photograph of two men, one in priest’s garb, who are unknown to him, as well as discovering places where Maggie had hidden a gun and ammunition.

With the assistance of his former police partner, Sam learns Maggie called a number in New Orleans shortly after Jimmy’s abduction. He arrives at the address only to witness a murder. Fearing he’ll be detained in suspicion of the murder, he manages to follow Maggie to New York. As he tracks down his missing wife, he learns that the woman he has known as Maggie Cody has a past he never suspected.

Author Shirley Palmer has written two other books under the pseudonym Nell Brien which could be termed romantic suspense. Danger Zone is pure mystery with no romantic overtones. In fact, it’s not difficult to imagine a Ladies’ Home Journal “Can This Marriage Be Saved?” column dealing with Sam and Maggie’s relationship: Her Secrets Endangered Our Son. The central mystery isn’t how Maggie and Sam will save their missing son - it’s Sam’s search to uncover the truth about his wife. This is a plot based on the Big Misunderstanding on steroids.

Maggie has good reason for keeping her true identity secret, but it seems extremely odd that in five years of marriage she’s never confided in her husband. It makes no more sense that she takes off alone to go in search of Jimmy. Her husband is a former policeman with skills that could be useful in the search, but in traditional hysterical Gothic heroine form, Maggie prefers to go careening around New York in a frenetic search all on her own, making demands, triggering other crimes.

Similarly, the story line careens all over the place, changing focus every few pages. There are times in the book it seems as though the characters have pretty much forgotten all about the missing tot as they get wrapped up in other business. The climaxing scene comes out of nowhere with a new villain (bad guys abound in this book) thrown in more for shock than literary value.

I thought A Veiled Journey, the author’s first book, was excellent and can recommend it. Danger Zone is not nearly as tautly structured and fails to satisfy.

--Lesley Dunlap