Blind Pursuit — Matthew F. Jones

"'Blind Pursuit' is a nail-bitingly suspenseful police procedural...muscular, Elmore Leonard-esque crime tale of a terrifying abduction...relentless, lean-and-mean page-turner plotting and a grimly satisfying ending." - Kirkus Reviews

"Jones is unpredictable and, therefore, terrifying. If you say yes to his use of language (like deciding to read poetry) you will not be able to shake him. He is a surgeon throughout the novel (reminiscent of Hitchcock)." - Susan Salter Reynolds, The Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Blind Pursuit" stoops to little of the crude button-pushing typical of child-kidnapping thrillers. As in "A Single Shot", Jones's 1996 novel about a hunter who accidentally shoots a teenage runaway, the interior story is as gripping as the exterior plot, both unfolding with an awful inexorability." - Gary Krist, Salon

"'Blind Pursuit' is the kind of novel the phrase "a page-turner" might have been invented for, an extremely well constructed (and sometimes quite moving) mystery." - David Pitt, Booklist

"If you read novels for the sheer beauty created from a talented writer's mind's eye, 'Blind Pursuit' is a must." - Pocono Record

When eight-year-old Jennifer Follett doesn't return home from school one day, the rigidly ordered lives of Edmund and Caroline Follett--a power couple with an expensive house outside Albany, New York--are suddenly upended. First comes the waiting; next comes the dread; finally, they are forced to think the unthinkable, as a wayward twelve-year-old boy admits that he watched from the woods as their daughter, whom they expected to board a school bus at the bottom of the driveway, got into a black sedan instead.

Although the Folletts' eccentric young nanny, Hannah, is less than forthcoming about why she let Jennifer out of her sight, police investigators soon begin to suspect another husband-and-wife pair: Gerald and Claire Sandoval, casual acquaintances of the Folletts who own a black LTD. But why would the model churchgoing couple kidnap a young girl? While they grow more and more convinced that the Sandovals are involved, the police are unable to find as much evidence to back up their suspicions. Frustrated by the law's presumed innocent safeguards, the Folletts determine to do whatever is necessary to get Jennifer back. Meanwhile, the well-meaning but incautious investigators go far beyond the call of duty in their desire to solve the crime. In their "blind pursuit," the search for Jennifer draws them deep into the upstate New York woods and into a chilling physical and psychological confrontation with evil.