BoneMan’s Daughters

BoneMan's DaughtersBoneMan’s Daughters by Ted Dekker
Publisher: Center Street
Number of pages:  410
My copy: paperback, bought from Fully Booked

Would you kill an innocent man to save your daughter?

They call him BoneMan, a serial killer who’s abducted six young women. He’s the perfect father looking for the perfect daughter, and when his victims fail to meet his lofty expectations, he kills them by breaking their bones and leaving them to die.

Intelligence officer Ryan Evans, on the other hand, has lost all hope of ever being the perfect father. His daughter and wife have written him out of their lives.

Everything changes when BoneMan takes Ryan’s estranged daughter, Bethany, as his seventh victim. Ryan goes after BoneMan on his own.

But the FBI sees it differently. New evidence points to the suspicion that Ryan is BoneMan. Now the hunter is the hunted, and in the end, only one father will stand.

* * *

He is called BoneMan and he is a father in search for a perfect daughter. He takes innocent teen girls and tries to make them love him and when they fail to be the daughter he wants, he breaks their bones without breaking their skin (or using a teflon hose). On the other side of the world, Ryan Evans thinks of himself as a failure of a father — after an especially harrowing abduction in the Middle East, Ryan comes home only to find that his wife and daughter had written him out of their lives. Then the BoneMan abducts his daughter, Bethany, and Ryan goes after him. Instead of helping him, though, the FBI finds evidence that points to Ryan as the BoneMan, and he becomes a hunted man. Desperate, Ryan Evans set out to go through hell just to save his daughter.

I’ve been a fan of Ted Dekker since I read Thr3e, which I think is also one of the first books I reviewed on my old blog. I liked the fact that he wrote Christian suspense and back then, I was having a hard time looking for books with the same themes. I meant to read more of his books but he writes and comes out with new books faster than I can get my hands on them and read them. I’ve had BoneMan’s Daughters for a while now but I never got around to reading it. I’m not sure why, maybe it’s because I was concentrating more on YA and chick lit instead of suspense. I did kind of look forward to reading this, thinking that it would be nice to go back to Dekker’s world.

True to form, BoneMan’s Daughters has everything that Dekker offers in his other books. Not that it’s repetitive, but it’s exactly what you’d expect in a Dekker book. There’s the psycho serial killer whose point of view we get a glimpse of every now and then, the father who would do everything to save his daughter, and the police who are willing to help but don’t really know what to do. In a way, it’s almost like reading a CSI episode — I can easily imagine Mac Taylor/Gary Sinise as Ryan Evans. Dekker is also still very descriptive, but not too much that it gets gross — just a tad disturbing, enough to make you look over your shoulder or wonder at the things that bump at night, or develop an aversion to Noxzema, in the case of BoneMan’s Daughters. It’s still very well-written and you know in the end that the good guys will still prevail.

That being said, however, I felt that this wasn’t really at par with the other Dekker novels I’ve read. I thought some parts were a bit repetitive and I wanted to skim some parts that felt a little unimportant to me. The ending wasn’t as satisfying as I thought it would be, either — and I felt that there wasn’t much change in the characters as there should be. The Christian concept wasn’t fully explored, too, IMHO, and you’d need to read the author’s afterword to know why he wrote the novel (that story, I loved). As good as the details were done in the emotional and brutal scenes, the overall story kind of lacked. In the end, I was just happy I finished reading it, not because it was such a good story.

I’m kind of sad that this latest Dekker read is kind of disappointing compared to his other books that I really liked. I will still read his other books, of course, and I’m hoping one of them will be as good (or even better) as Thr3e or the Circle series.

Rating: [rating=2]

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