Into the Fire

Is it? Not in Tedd Dekker’s and Erin Healy’s partnership new release Kiss. They take an unimaginative and overused plot and give it an amazing new twist facilitated by a kiss and/or a needy touch.

In the prologue we meet Shauna McAllister and her beloved brother Rudy in a session with her therapist Dr. Ayers. She has significant father issues which began when her father remarried the stereotypical wicked witch step-mother Patrice. Since her father is running for the presidency of the USA, she has become the black sheep daughter positioned to undermine and embarrass her father with serious confrontational discussions. Rudy is both her advocate and the attempted peacemaker between the two of them, assisting their father in every aspect of his campaign.

The next thing we know Shauna experiences an evil and harrowing darkness in her mind while lying comatose in a hospital bed. When she awakens, much of her memory from the last six months has abandoned her, but she is informed that she was driving when she crossed the center line, overcompensated and went into the water. She can remember her brother was in the car, but no one will tell her where or how badly injured Rudy is, and she begins to assume the worst. The one thing it seems everyone wants her to know is that it was all her fault, there were drugs in her system and in her car, and she is being charged for possession and reckless endangerment.

Amnesia in all its various forms is a common and sometimes overused element in drama, but the secret of this partial amnesia is a drug-induced experiment designed to cover up major fraudulent activities and some hardcore, ugly crime found by Shauna and a reporter she no longer remembers. However, unbeknownst to the antagonists in this story is a dimension which they could never have engineered in their sinister plotting.

There are still some things Shauna cannot accept about herself as she is being somewhat force fed unrecognized facts about herself and the accident. When she relates a horrifying and totally realistic dream to her supposed boyfriend, he remarks that it sounds a lot like an incident which happened to him in college. After their first kiss, she sees a whole lot more about him than she had ever known before, and the startling recollection begins her treacherous pursuit of truth about what really happened to her and Rudy.

Shauna becomes a valiant heroine as she eases her way forward to discover who she was and who she now is. At times she’s pathetic, irritating, vulnerable, naïve, and even somewhat unlikable in her bitterness, but in the end after her intense efforts to recreate her past and stop what she suspects is an effort to destroy her, we root for her courageous plans and attempts to rescue someone she has begun to remember.

There are additional important factors to the story including a multi-faceted love story, but I’m not going to spoil them for you here. This is an entertaining read with a workable twist to the use of amnesia, and the ending is redemptive. I would say the current trend of many CBA writers seems to put Christianity in the background often through solid peripheral characters, making their protagonists prodigal types or total unbelievers. Kiss is no exception although the gospel message streams throughout symbolically, keeping a low profile.

Dekker and Healy write well together, but there were a few evil characters and plot sequences which seemed stereotypical, contrived, and convenient. It depends on what you’re looking for when you read a story like this. I enjoyed the book and would recommend it to audiences who like action, suspense, solving mysterious puzzles, and page-turners.

Father, you’ve given Tedd Dekker many, many stories. I pray you would continue to inspire his writing and that he would be obedient to you in all he does. Bless the work of his hands. Continue to watch over, direct, and bless Erin Healy in her career. In the Name of Jesus, Amen.