From Publishers Weekly
Forensic artist Paul Bern uses his impressive talents as a sculptor to reconstruct a face on an anonymous skull brought to him under mysterious circumstances in Lindsey's latest in a long line of expertly constructed thrillers (The Rules of Silence, etc.). The more Paul works on the skull, the more he's convinced that there's something distinctly disturbing about the emerging features. Soon after he figures it out (long after the reader has done so), he finds himself caught up in a murky world of spies, smugglers and international terrorism. Forced to abandon his idyllic central Texas home, he travels to Mexico City, where he must impersonate his own, recently murdered, CIA agent twin brother. Heavy Rain is the code name of the mission; the purpose is to capture or kill the world's most feared terrorist, Ghazi Baida. There's a beautiful agent, Susana Mejía, and the usual collection of Mexican hoods, but the real showstopper is Vicente Mondragón, a man whose entire face has been removed in a drug vendetta, leaving him with nothing more than exposed muscle, bone, gristle, protruding lips and a naked pair of googly eyes. This horror is kept antiseptic by a thin transparent membrane that Vicente must spritz at regular intervals. The novel's suspense lies in Paul's ongoing efforts to maintain his identity as his own brother and at the same time attempt to uncover Baida's terror plan. The plot is deftly handled, the characters are sharp and memorable, there's a shocker twist at the end and the background information on faces, or the lack thereof, is fascinating. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


From Booklist
Paul Bern, a forensic artist, has a fascinating job: re-creating the facial features of homicide or accident victims. But his job gets even more fascinating when a woman shows up at his door with a skull in a bag. She believes it's the remains of her husband, and she wants Paul to confirm her suspicion. Paul soon learns some things about himself that shock him, and in no time he's railroaded by the U.S. government into helping them ferret out a group of terrorists in South America. This is a troublesome novel from a brand-name thriller author. Its plot is needlessly far-fetched (you can feel Lindsey struggling to justify putting his fish-out-of-water protagonist into the places the plot requires him to be). Its characters are thin, and Alice, the 17-year-old girl whose "cognitive disconnect" allows her to sense when someone is lying, belongs in a different novel altogether (perhaps something by Dean Koontz, who knows what to do with this kind of character). The prose is workmanlike, for the most part, although the final chapter contains some of the worst writing of the year. Although Lindsey has a large fan base, and he has written some good novels, this is not one of them. It will sell, but finishing it--even for his keenest fans--will be an act of sheer willpower. David Pitt
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of The Rules of Silence and Mercy comes another relentless thriller that will keep readers up all night.


About the Author
David Lindsey is the author of 11 highly acclaimed novels. He lives in Austin, Tx.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"He reconstructs the faces of the dead. But nothing has prepared him for the true face of fear. Now one man must confront the frightening puzzle of his own personality while navigating a treacherous, hidden world where that which is alien becomes familiar, and the familiar is shrouded in mystery." "The faceless are Paul Bern's business. As a forensic artist in Austin, Texas, Paul painstakingly reconstructs the likenesses of unfortunate souls whose features have been obliterated by crime or accident. As macabre as his vocation may be, it has become a comfortable and lucrative routine - until the day a mysterious woman arrives at his studio. The visitor brings two gifts. The first is a human skull she has smuggled out of Mexico. The second is a staggering secret that brings him eyeball to eyeball with a past he never knew he had." "Suddenly, Paul's own government blackmails him into cooperating in a clandestine mission against a Middle Eastern terrorist group that has made the drug jungles of South America its staging ground. By using his own face as bait to lure the enemy, he will become all too intimate with the underworld of violence that he seeks to destroy, while thousands of lives hang in the balance of his intricate and dangerous deception." Paul's only guide will be a beautiful young girl with a strange and miraculous talent for seeing the unseeable. His chief nemesis will be an ingenious terrorist so brazen he refuses to mask his real identity from his pursuers. And his most stunning discovery will be the dark impulses that had always waited dormant in his own unwitting heart. Ultimately, the master of faces will never look at a face, his or others', the same way again - if he survives.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Forensic artist Paul Bern uses his impressive talents as a sculptor to reconstruct a face on an anonymous skull brought to him under mysterious circumstances in Lindsey's latest in a long line of expertly constructed thrillers (The Rules of Silence, etc.). The more Paul works on the skull, the more he's convinced that there's something distinctly disturbing about the emerging features. Soon after he figures it out (long after the reader has done so), he finds himself caught up in a murky world of spies, smugglers and international terrorism. Forced to abandon his idyllic central Texas home, he travels to Mexico City, where he must impersonate his own, recently murdered, CIA agent twin brother. Heavy Rain is the code name of the mission; the purpose is to capture or kill the world's most feared terrorist, Ghazi Baida. There's a beautiful agent, Susana Mejia, and the usual collection of Mexican hoods, but the real showstopper is Vicente Mondragon, a man whose entire face has been removed in a drug vendetta, leaving him with nothing more than exposed muscle, bone, gristle, protruding lips and a naked pair of googly eyes. This horror is kept antiseptic by a thin transparent membrane that Vicente must spritz at regular intervals. The novel's suspense lies in Paul's ongoing efforts to maintain his identity as his own brother and at the same time attempt to uncover Baida's terror plan. The plot is deftly handled, the characters are sharp and memorable, there's a shocker twist at the end and the background information on faces, or the lack thereof, is fascinating. Agent, Aaron Priest Literary Agency. (Apr. 20) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

AudioFile

Dick Hill, an AudioFile Golden Voice, expertly draws listeners into the dark and secretive world of blackmail and government cover-ups. As the story changes location and characters, Hill's intonation and accent also change, allowing listeners to effortlessly move in and out of foreign countries and the persona of the characters. The listening experience is further enhanced by the announcement of the number of each cassette at the beginning of the cassette and the announcement of the number of the next cassette is at the end of Side 2. This helps listeners keep track of their progress throughout the story. S.K.P. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews