Point Of No Return by Scott Frost

This is a book review of the thriller that I have got in my hands right now. It's a short overview of the plot as I understand it which should give you a reasonable idea of what to expect when you go to read it.

Point Of No Return by Scott Frost

Point of No Return is the 3rd novel by Scott Frost following Never Fear and Run the Risk. All 3 books feature Pasadena Homicide Detective Lieutenant Alex Delillo, a woman who has been put through the emotional ringer over the last couple of harrowing books. This series has taken on a dark, brooding tone which is particularly prevalent at the start of Point Of No Return. Alex Delillo is living in a house that is surrounded by burnt out shells of houses that were destroyed in recent bushfires that ravaged the outskirts of Los Angeles. She is also still affected from personal trauma after recovering memories from her childhood and learning the truth about her father (see Run the Risk).

Basically, Alex Delillo has reached an emotional tipping point in her life.

One night Alex receives a telephone call from a man who utters a strange, meaningless sentence: “I saw a boy on a bicycle vanish in a flash of light.” She doesn’t know what it means and knows she should forget she ever took the call, but is compelled by the voice.

Then one day a woman comes to her front door. The woman is the wife of a former LAPD policeman who joined a private security firm and went to Iraq to train the local police. Jack Salem was supposed to have returned home but has not appeared. Instead he sent a package to his wife and in it is a sealed envelope that was to be delivered to Alex with clear instructions that no other police are to be involved. Alex barely knows the man, although she does remember him from a forensic presentation she gave years ago.

As well as the package, the woman has also brought a postcard that she received from her husband. On the postcard is a single line of writing:

“I saw a boy on a bicycle vanish in a flash of light.”

Jack Salem didn’t vanish in Iraq. It seems that he is in the United States but he’s in hiding. When Alex tries to contact Salem’s wife a second time she finds that the woman has also disappeared, but by the look of her apartment, her disappearance was not voluntary.

For no reason that Alex can verbalize, she feels compelled to look for Jack Salem. Her search is destined to take her out into the desolate, forbidding desert that surrounds Los Angeles and to a secret training facility that deals in death.