Will quickly heads to the Cape after a frantic call from his mother-in-law. Emily is simply gone, vanished into thin air, and the police aren’t convinced that she simply didn’t abandon her family of her own accord. But when Emily’s abandoned car is discovered in the grocery store parking lot, filled with bags of spoiled groceries, the police begin to take Emily’s disappearance very seriously. Seriously enough to hire a retired FBI profiler who thinks that Emily’s disappearance is part of a larger pattern.

Every seven years, on the exact same day, a mother disappears. Five days later her seven-year-old son vanishes. Which means the clock is ticking for Emily and her seven-year-old son, Sammie.

There’s a lot to like in Pepper’s debut, as she concocts an appealing premise with chilling possibilities. She also blends in elements traditionally found in general fiction – in depth character development that allows the reader to get to know all the players on the chessboard. Unfortunately, this is also the novel’s biggest hindrance.

While having found some of the character development interesting, this reviewer couldn’t help but think that for a suspense novel a lot of it was extraneous. For instance, Will Parker’s parents died in a tragic automobile accident when he was quite young and he has blocked out most of those traumatic details. While this is all interesting, it really doesn’t do much to propel the story forward. Time spent on details such as this means time spent away from the investigation into Emily’s disappearance, the mind of the serial kidnapper/killer, and the inner workings of the police and FBI characters working on the case.

All these little details were most likely meant to illustrate how each character is affected by Emily’s disappearance and the way they cope with it. However all these internal musings tend to bog down the pace of the story. The suspense thread doesn’t lose momentum – it merely takes a long time to get off the ground.

Still it’s admirable the author squeezing this all in a book written in segments. Since the kidnapper/killer works on a five-day time frame – the author separates her story by days. About halfway through Day 3 is when the plot really begins to pick up, and by Day 4 this book is especially hard to put down.

On the front cover of my Advanced Reading Copy there are several quotes by well-known authors of mystery and suspense. Most of them feature words like “mesmerizing,” and “gripping,” and for the first half I was beginning to wonder if we had all read the same book. By the end, I knew we had. The final message of this story is particularly chilling – which had this reviewer looking over her shoulder in her quiet apartment.

While this reviewer suspects that seasoned suspense readers may find Pepper’s debut a little slow in spots, it has lovely crossover potential to the general fiction market. Readers who like lots of inside character development and internal musings will find quite a bit of that in Five Days Of Summer, and suspense readers will find that the plot really cooks in the latter half. It’s a promising start for Pepper and it will be interesting to see what sort of chilling possibilities she cooks up for her second effort.

--Wendy Crutcher