“Every Breath You Take”

Thomas Rowe awakens on an airplane bound for Chicago. Nothing unusual for most of us, except Thomas Rowe died 24 years before in a traffic accident, leaving behind his two-year-old daughter Kayla. The man sitting next to him tells him to fasten his seat belt, and that he’s being sent back because there’s something only he can do. It has to do with Kayla – and the man can’t tell him what it is.

Kayla Rowe is getting married in three months. She has spent a lifetime missing the father who was killed. She’s spent the last two years missing Billy Harris, a young musician she met in college and whom she fell in love with. And Billy Harris, despite his musical talent, is going nowhere, because he can’t get over Kayla Rowe.

It’s obvious that Travis Thrasher’s Every Breath You Take is a love story. But it’s not the kind of love story you expect when you start reading it, and it certainly isn’t the kind you expected by the time you finish it. But it is many things more than a simple romance. A deeply satisfying story. A story about love and misguided intentions. A story about love getting derailed and set right. A story about soul mates. A story about a father’s love that is so strong that it reaches across eternity. A story about the love for music.

I was captivated. I didn’t want this novel to end. There are scenes between Kayla and Billy that are so real and so familiar that it’s like living your own first love all over again.

Thrasher started his writing career with two love stories, The Promise Remains (2000) and The Watermark (2001). He then moved into suspense, and has written a series of outstanding suspense novels, like Admission (2006), Isolation (2008) and Ghostwriter (2009), along with several before and since. Sky Blue (2007) might defy classification; it is a kind of combination suspense novel and love story that’s an extraordinary work.

And now Every Breath You Take. While all of his other novels have been published by conventional publishing firms, this one is self-published. It fell outside publisher expectations and, I suspect, he wanted to do this one entirely himself, because it is its own love story – Thrasher’s love story for his own daughter.

The love story about music is important, too. The novel’s title comes from a song by the Police/Sting. And there are a lot of references to Cold Play and other groups (I like Cold Play, although I know I’m not supposed to at my age, and I was tickled to catch all the references in the novel).

A final note. This was not a review copy. I bought it through Thrasher’s web site because I’ve read a lot of his other works. And I knew this one was going to be special. But it surpassed even my high expectations.

For more information on the book and how to buy it, visit Thrasher’s web site. And I give you my strongest recommendation to do so.

Every Breath You Take is that good.

Back to College with "Admission"

I posted a review of Travis Thrasher's Admission at Amazon.com, and I won't repeat or recycle it here. It's sufficient to say I liked this mystery/suspense novel. Anyone who's ever been a college student or known a college student will recognize the intensity of college life (including the binge drinking), how things seem to matter so much more than they ever will again, and the college pranks and practical jokes and what happens when they go wrong.

The novel is the story of how one former college student has to find out what happened in an incident from 11 years before. Thrasher keeps you guessing throughout. Someone did something, and you gradually begin to suspect what the something was, but the mystery is who might have done it and the details of what actually happened. The story is structured and tied together well. You finish Admission and you're satisifed. This is an author who writes for his readers, and he writes very well indeed. I've previously read his Isolation and Sky Blue, and all of his books are good.

Admission also provokes long-buried memories. You think back to your own college days and about things that happened that you remember or heard about. It reminded me of college "names," the student "wheels" on campus. And then the book connected me to the memory of going to the police jail in my college town on a cold, overcast Sunday morning. A friend and I, he a "name" in student government and I a "name" on the student newspaper, went there to see if we could get a girl we knew released from custody. She'd been arrested because because she was with her boyfriend when he was arrested for drug possession (this was the early 1970s).

The girl was a type -- sweet, naive, innocent and wildly in love with her boyfriend, who was also a "name" in student government. And, shocking everyone, a drug dealer. We talked with the police; they listened and told us to leave, but they did release her about an hour later and never pressed charges against her. Some time later, another student government "name," who was one of the university's official, card-carrying-and-proud-of-it "leftists," suddenly quit school. It turned out he was actually a narc, and had been the one to turn the guy, and many others, in.

The narc's girlfriend, another "name" in student journalism, was a good friend of mine (we'd even dated a couple of times). She was devastated. Think what that would have meant for her --dating a guy who turned out to be narc who turned in his friends, then disappeared. She loved the guy, but she was only part of his cover, and their relationship a complete sham, as was his commitment to the campus leftist political association he was part of (which, by the way, never recovered from the scandal of having a narc in its midst). This sounds like a novel, but it actually happened.

There's an intensity about college life that's hard to describe -- you have to live it to understand it. That's what Travis Thatcher captured in Admission.

How Did the Story Hook Me?

On Monday, I was interviewed for a project at work -- I'd been asked to read Tony Dungy's Uncommon: Finding Your Path to Significance and then be interviewed for one of the print publications published by the company for employees. The interview went fine -- took all of about 15 minutes and we were done. Tuesday morning, I received the draft for comment -- the turnaround was quick. It was a different way to do a book review -- have someone read a book and then talk to them about what they read.

Last night, I started reading Travis Thrasher's Admission. It jumped around a bit at first, or it was actually more a case of me being easily distracted. And then, by about page 20, I was hooked. I had a hard time putting it down but I had to get to sleep. I went back this morning and tried to find the spot where Thrasher hurled me into the story, but I don't see the precise point. All I know is that it happened, somewhere around page 20, when the lead character, Jake Rivers, is offered $50,000 to find a college friend he hasn't seen in 11 years. It's odd how those hooks work. You're reading along, trying to figure out if you're going to be interested or not, and the next thing you know, it's 60 pages later. Gotcha.

I have to fly to New York this afternoon for a talk I'm giving tomorrow at a Conference Board meeting (my assigned topic is "Creating and Managing Online Content"). I can't wait for the plane ride and a good two hours of uninterrupted reading.