ARA Review by davidmwpowers of The Savage Surrogate

[davidmwpowers]

[Following is an OnlineBookClub.org ARA Review of the book, The Savage Surrogate.]

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3 out of 5 stars

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The Savage Surrogate is standalone novel by Dorothy May Mercer and one of her McBride stories, this one focussing on Senator Mike McBride, his wife Juli, and her kidnapped friend Fran.

Having stuck her nose in a little too far, Fran is captured, enslaved and forced to be a broodmare and surrogate mother. When a contact from the previous case contacts Juli, she and her tracker dog Lady Dog are pulled into an international hunt to literally sniff out her whereabouts. Meanwhile we also learn about the clinic and the client for Fran's baby. At the same time Mike is called back home to Carson City to look into strange doings there, with a corrupt mayor sacking their family members and friends in order to stack the police and fire department with his people, and the murder of the first person to provide Mike with any information. But then the parallel threads start to draw together, while a false lead puts Juli and Lady Dog in a difficult situation.

Although this is #3 in the Washington McBride series, I had no problem following it without having read the previous instalments, nor does it seem to contain much in the way of spoilers for the previous books.

The plot is well crafted and cleverly connected together, if relying somewhat on a sequence of coincidences. While the book is readable, as with other Mercer novels some suspended disbelief is in order. While Mercer has obviously done a lot of research, the science and technology background is at times a little shakey.

Overall, I'm giving it 3 out of 5 stars as a light story with both amateur and professional police work and a good cast of well-drawn main characters and adequately characterized minor characters and bad guys. Still it was pretty tame as a thriller, and the cases seemed to resolve themselves more than actually be solved by the protagonists.

After reading my first Mercer/McBride novel I was prepared to give them another go, but after this one I’m not in any particular hurry to read another – although it was not a bad way to while away a few hours and I may well dabble again.

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