Jay Johnson's life has been turned upside down. Forcibly
placed into the Witness Protection Program, Jay is told
he must remember what happened that put him there... but
Jay has no idea what the government thinks he knows.
FIFTY MICE has an intriguing premise. I like that we know
upfront that Jay is an unreliable narrator so we can
filter through what he says and does. The aura of mystery
and suspense is quickly built as the almost staccato
style writing amps up the tension.
Unfortunately, FIFTY MICE begins to lag action-wise
somewhere in the middle as we get stuck in the mundane,
daily routines of the characters. Jay is assigned a wife
and child as part of the Witness Protection Program, and
thus the interactions between Jay, Ginger, and Helen
begin to consume more of the storyline as the pace slows
down quite a bit.
FIFTY MICE is the sort of story that reads as if it is a
movie or television show. The premise is a fascinating
one and I enjoyed the majority of the story. Readers who
like a good character-driven thriller will appreciate
FIFTY MICE.
What if a man is placed in the Federal Witness Protection
Program against his will?
And doesn’t even know what he supposedly knows that merits
a
new name, a new identity, a new life?
Jay Johnson is an Average Joe, a thirty-something guy with
a
job in telephone sales, a regular pick-up basketball game,
and a devoted girlfriend he seems ready to marry. But one
weekday afternoon, he’s abducted on a Los Angeles Metro
train, tranquilized, interrogated, and his paper trail
obliterated. What did he see, what terrible crime—or
criminal—is he keeping secret? It must be something
awfully
big. The trouble is, Jay has no clue.
Furious and helpless, and convinced that the government
has
made a colossal mistake, Jay is involuntarily relocated to
a
community on Catalina Island—which turns out to be
inhabited
mainly by other protected witnesses. Isolated in a world
of
strangers, Jay begins to realize that only way out is
through the twisted maze of lies and unreliable memories
swirling through his own mind. If he can locate—or invent—
a
repressed memory that might satisfy the Feds, maybe he can
make it back to the mainland and his wonderful, even if
monotonous, life.
Set in a noir contemporary L.A. and environs, Fifty Mice
is
a Hitchcockian thriller as surreal and mysterious as a
Kafka
nightmare. Chilling, paranoiac, and thoroughly original,
it
will have readers grasping to distinguish what is real and
what only seems that way.
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