Top critical review
3.0 out of 5 starsSuspenseful
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 25, 2019
This is a tense story of a red-headed divorcee and her (autistic?) son, caught in a terrorist attack in a shopping mall. An off-duty FBI Agent is also there, reluctantly doing his family Christmas shopping. The mother hides her son in a cupboard in a toy shop, leaving him with strict instructions not to move. I could not figure out why she left him alone, but the FBI Agent ends up fetching the 8-year old mute boy for his mother because she is prohibited from going back for him. The boy overheard the terrorists discussing their plans in the toy shop after killing everyone in sight. Not only that, but his phenomenal artistic ability and photographic memory enabled him to draw what he could not verbalise.
He then became the target of the terrorists.
The strong attraction between the red-head and FBI Agent provided the romance, but the motive for the entire debacle was completely lost to me. Syrians seemed to be behind the attacks, with seven terrorists of which one was female. She was used to sit next to one injured man with a Western name in a private room in a hospital, slipping a tablet under his tongue each time he began to wake up. On one occasion he recognised her and tried to call for help. She pinned his arms down with her knees, kneeling over him on the hospital bed, while opening a phial for a tablet, while his heartbeat raced frantically yet the nurses did not immediately respond to his urgent need. She did not like to kill people, but was blackmailed to do the dirty work of waiting for the President to visit the victims, then shoot him, because someone from her country had her children. This is where I lost the plot. Mossad had apparently killed all the victims to put the blame on Syria. The story made absolutely no sense to me. It was a thinly-veiled political slur aimed at Israel using the reader's sympathy for a poor single mother with her poor autistic son to gain sympathy for some unknown Eastern block innocent victims. I found it vague, unclear and offensive.
