OUT OF NOWHERE

While an accomplished narration can help reveal the pleasures of a book, it can also expose a book's flaws. All Bernadette Dunne's perfectly professional reading does for this thriller is to highlight clichéd writing, wooden dialogue, inauthentic characters and a preposterous plot. The novel concerns a New York police detective who, as a child, entered into the Witness Protection Program after her mother's courageous testimony about a money-laundering scheme. Now, twenty years later, their secret is blown and their lives jeopardized. Dunne's earnest reading only calls attention to Mortman's deficiencies. M.O. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine [Published: APR/MAY 00]