Angle of Impact

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Wild improbability and cardboard characters mar this legal thriller from MacDougal (Breach of Trust), which features a heroine who has trained herself to be "as insensitive as any man." Workaholic law partner Dana Svenssen, a leggy blonde "Valkyrie" pushing 40 but "an eyecatcher still," is on her car phone with the president of Pennsteel corporation when his helicopter crashes. She races to the scene of the accident, a Pennsylvania amusement park where, coincidentally, her own prepubescent daughters are recreating with their day camp. There she discovers that the client's JetRanger has mysteriously collided with a light plane: all five air passengers are dead, and seven others are killed on the ground when the wreckage suddenly explodes. After briskly confirming that her girls are unharmed, Dana cancels vacation plans in order to defend her corporate client's not-so-deep pockets. But this is no ordinary day at the office for Dana: her home and car are burglarized, then her mopey, writer's-blocked husband vanisheskidnapped, she soon learns, by some shadowy group with ties to the accident. Meanwhile, Dana finds herself swept into a torrid affair with a "dimpled and devilish" accident reconstructionist some 10 years her junior. ("Suddenly she understood how a million men must have felt before her. I've worked so hard, and I've given so much. This is my reward.") Between over-the-top action sequences, MacDougal shows a flair for interoffice intrigue (and even delivers a few zingers on lawyers' staffing and billing procedures). But Dana's self-absorbed machisma is unappealing, sometimes even creepy, and many of the secondary characters are paper-thin, particularly her daughters, surely the most compliant preteens on the planet. (Apr.)

Library Journal

In this thriller by MacDougal (Breach of Trust, LJ 9/1/96), Dana Svenssen, a brilliant attorney at a Philadelphia law firm, witnesses the collision of a client's helicopter and a small plane over an amusement park. By the time Dana discovers that the exclusive photos she took of the disaster prove that it was sabotage, the perpetrators have kidnapped her estranged husband, Whit, in a bid to obtain the film. MacDougal's first novel worked because the story maintained a level of suspense throughout. This book, however, aims straight for the Judith Krantz/Danielle Steel crowd, with gorgeous people and turgid sex. The missing ingredient is danger. Indeed, Dana's husband, a college professor, feels so secure with his captors that he manages to finish his analysis of Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose after a 20-year case of writer's block! The laughable climax has husband and wife embracing in a portable toilet. Recommended only for libraries where the author's first novel was popular (this is not a sequel).Laurel A. Wilson, Alexandrian P.L., Mount Vernon, Ind.