Help Me Please

Figueroa and Bennis #3

by Barbara D'Amato

An hour and a half after three-year-old Danielle Gaston is kid-napped from the Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago, a new Web site pops up on the World Wide Web--featuring Danielle Gaston. She's isolated in a room with no food and only water to drink. This live-action Web page is available to all net users around the world and is soon rebroadcast on CNN and other television networks.

Since Danielle is the only child of a popular country-and-western singer and a senator, her case is a high profile one--and likely to end in heartbreak. Unless Deputy Chief of Detectives Polly Kelly can crack the case before the child is harmed.

Genres: Mystery, Thriller

352 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Aka Malacai Black

Barbara D'Amato has had a checkered career, working in the distant past as an assistant surgical orderly, carpenter for stage magic illusions, assistant tiger handler, stage manager, researcher for attorneys in criminal cases, and recently sometimes teaching mystery writing to Chicago police officers.

"Writing is the greatest job of all," D'Amato says. "I get to hang around with cops, go ask people questions about their jobs that I would be too chicken to ask without a reason, and walk around Chicago looking for good murder locales. Best of all, I get to read mystery and suspense novels and call it keeping up with the field."

She was the 1999-2000 president of Mystery Writers of America. D'Amato is also a past president of Sisters in Crime International.

D'Amato is a playwright, novelist, and crime researcher. Her research on the Dr. John Branion murder case formed the basis for a segment on "Unsolved Mysteries," and she appeared on the program. Her musical comedies, The Magic Man and children's musical The Magic of Young Houdini, written with husband Anthony D'Amato, played in Chicago and London. Their Prohibition-era musical comedy RSVP Broadway, which played in Chicago in 1980, was named an "event of particular interest" by Chicago magazine. A native of Michigan, she has been a resident of Chicago for many years.

Reviews

[Eric_W · Rating 3 out of 5]

Deputy Chief of Detectives Polly Kelly has a difficult case. Someone with a great deal of technical knowledge has kidnapped Danni, the three-year-old only child of famous singer Maggie McKittredge and her husband senator Neal Gaston. The child was taken from a Catholic Mass by someone disguised as a priest. The police were notified almost immediately, but within a matter of minutes the child's live picture appears on an Internet web site for all the world to see. She is locked in a room with no food, only a water bottle. As usual, there is the bumbling supervisor (why this seems to be a staple of detective fiction might make an interesting sociological investigation sometime) and the obnoxious and occasionally incompetent feebees (FBI) to cause Polly grief and interference. The kidnapper always seems to anticipate the authorities, leaving little snide notes behind ("You Think You're So Smart"). It soon surfaces that Senator Gaston had quite a few enemies. He was chairman of a senate committee on hate-groups, and his personal manager, Todd Haralson, was a member of a fundamentalist church called the Redeemer Returns. They opposed very little except anything that messed with the human genome, believing that the human germ plasm was part of creation and anything that tinkered with its continuity was evil. Maggie and Neal had visited a fertility clinic in order to conceive, and Danni was the product of a technique that Todd's church believed to be morally reprehensible. Finally, the kidnappers contact them by displaying their demands on the floor of the room where Danni is being held: Free Johnnie Raft. Raft was the incarcerated leader of Bandwidth, a group of cyber terrorists who wanted to take over control of the world by displaying their superior technological intelligence. Believing that people should be chosen for office based on a meritocratic system, they had designed and implemented numerous terrorist activities by controlling computerized communications. In the meantime, Polly has asked her detectives to look for any bizarre crimes or events, in addition to normal police investigations related to the kidnapping, and she discovers that three people had been killed under unusual circumstances. By tracking down what links them together, she pieces together the clues that lead ultimately to discovery of the building where Danni has been held. She also discovers that Bandwidth might not be be led by Raft.

[LJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Help Me Please - Ex (2001 Top Read)
D'Amato, Barbara - 3rd in Figueroa and Bennis series

A chilling criminal kink in the World Wide Web could lead to a horrifying crime unless Polly Kelly of the Chicago Police Department can prevent it.

I love both D'Amato's series. The lady knows how to write. This was suspenseful and had an ending where I was particularly pleased to see the villian get their due. If you've not read D'Amato, give her a try.

[Douglas Cook · Rating 3 out of 5]

First sentence - "Golden air filled Holy Name Cathedral."

[Janet]

ok. LB.