Overview
Elise Jeffries, new media spokesperson for the huge multi-national ScanTron, has to prove herself - and do it fast. She lost her last job and ended up in court when a man she trusted leaked information she had given him - information that turned out to be dead wrong. The mistake ruined her career and nearly wrecked her marriage, as the costs of the lawsuit wiped out her husband's dreams of his own business. Now a chemical plant explodes and a huge fire threatens to rip through her old Texas hometown of Flatwoods - a disaster that has already destroyed several nearby homes. The friendly town of Flatwoods that Elise remembers from childhood has disappeared, replaced by rows of houses for sale and angry people suffering from a series of mysterious ailments. As the acrid smoke from the fire covers the area, more people fall ill. But the company denies that anything toxic is stored at their facility, and Elise believes them. She believes them until she finds her girlfriend - still young but no longer the pretty, vibrant woman Elise remembers - ravaged by illness. With her suspicions growing and her old nemesis trying to win her back into his confidence, and perhaps his bed, Elise must defend ScanTron or lose her job. But her conscience tells her she must do something else - find out the truth about the accident, the truth about ScanTron's real business, the truth about the sickness killing her people. It's an investigation that will take grit and daring, for Elise is uncovering secrets someone is willing to kill to keep.Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Elise Jeffries's first day on the job as media spokesperson for ScanTron International Security begins with a 4:15 a.m. phone call from her boss, who informs her that the company's Tide County chemical storage facility has gone up in flames. As Elise races toward the scene, leaving her husband, Blake, and son, Junior, asleep in their quiet Houston suburb, she also heads back into her past: the ScanTron conflagration has jumped the road separating it from Flatwoods, the working-class black community where she grew up. The blaze ignites a block of modest bungalows and injures several residents. The TV reporter covering the community disaster is Carlos Rico, who nearly destroyed Elise's professional and personal life several years earlier. Enmeshed in a nightmare of conflicting loyalties, Elise discovers that Flatwoods's residents, including her childhood friend Damita, suffer from mysterious illnesses. Carlos wants Elise's help in uncovering the secret behind ScanTron, a collaboration in which she would have to trust him and possibly expose her new boss. Damita urgently suggests that the foul-smelling creek running from ScanTron through her property is the cause of her cancer. As she investigates, Elise finds her job, marriage, family and her very life at risk. While the issues echo newspaper headlines of recent years, Bunkley's (Wild Embers) sharp and absorbing page-turner neatly takes on the tangled issue of corporate environmental abuse and its impact on a small black community. (July)Library Journal
Elise Jeffries's marriage, friendships, integrity, and probationary job as media spokesperson for Houston-based ScanTron Security International are challenged when a suicidal driver crashes into a gate at a remote warehouse complex in mostly African American Flatwoods. The ensuing fire consumes the compound and many nearby homes and sickens residents. As a former Flatwoods resident, Elise is torn between supporting a husband intent on leaving his secure job to start a risky business, helping endangered friends, and representing the company. With the support of the company president, she and a former friend uncover the secrets buried in the ashes and in the past. This combination environmental/industrial thriller and character study is overly melodramatic. Nevertheless, this new novel by the author of Black Gold (LJ 12/93) belongs in most popular fiction collections for its portrait of a competent career woman balancing multiple demands and expectations.V. Louise Saylor, formerly with Eastern Washington Univ. Lib., CheneyKirkus Reviews
Bunkley (Starlight Passage, 1996, etc.) has toned down her tendency toward purple prose, but, ironically, while the writing's vastly improved in this new outing, the plot could use some livening up.Elise Jeffries and her husband Blake have been through some hard times; ever since Elise lost her hospital p.r. job in a scandal, the couple has struggled financially and emotionally. Now, however, when Elise gets an opportunity to be the media spokesperson for ScanTron Security International, a company based in her hometown of Flatwoods, Texas, the tide appears to be turning for the better—until the massive ScanTron complex explodes in flames, and the townspeople, some of whom were injured in the fire, want answers and want them now. Was the company complex, as seems increasingly likely, housing toxic chemicals? To Elise's frustration, Al Patterson, the surly, seemingly racist and outspokenly sexist manager of the ScanTron site, won't provide pertinent information to anyone, least of all Elise. And while vain, handsome TV reporter Carlos Rico gets on Elise's case, harassing her for answers in an attempt to boost his own profile, her parents, her best childhood friend, Damita, and all of her old acquaintances in town say can't understand why she's working for the enemy. When it appears that ScanTron's been keeping some deadly secrets, threatening those that Elise loves most, her crisis of conscience, troubled marriage, and spotted past are all brought to the forefront, causing her to make hard decisions that will alter the course of many lives.
Fast-moving and realistic, though readers will wish that Bunkley had found ways of tempering all its somber business with other kinds of liveliness in characters and events.