Onyx reviews: If She Wakes by Michael Koryta

Reviewed by Bev Vincent, 06/08/2019

Though Tara Beckley is the "she" of If She Wakes, the main conflict in the novel is between Abby Kaplan, an insurance investigator who thinks there's something off about the supposed accident that put Tara into hospital in Boston, and a ruthless killer who has been tasked with cleaning up the mess.

Tara, a senior at Hammel College in Maine, was escorting visiting Professor Oltamu from a faculty dinner to the location where he is supposed to make a presentation when they are attacked. Oltamu had been acting suspiciously, requesting a change of route and unexplained stops along the way despite Tara's urgency to get him to the lecture hall on time. It becomes abundantly clear he had something to fear. He is killed in the deliberate vehicular assault, and Tara is left in a coma.

When Tara wakes up, she's unable to communicate because of a phenomenon called "locked-in syndrome." She is fully conscious but her body won't respond to commands. Her family and doctors aren't aware she's awake, which is to her advantage at first, because the people behind the attack on Oltamu want to find out what she witnessed. So long as she's non-responsive, she's safe.

The university hires Abby Kaplan to investigate to protect themselves against any potential liability arising from the incident. In her previous career, she was a stunt driver in Los Angeles. She knows a lot about how cars behave under extreme circumstances, so she recognizes immediately that the wreck that injured Tara couldn't have happened the way the other driver claimed, even though he confessed to causing the accident. Her suspicions are confirmed when the driver is subsequently murdered.

The McGuffin that drives the story is Oltamu's cell phone, which wasn't recovered from the scene. He applied several layers of security to it in the moments before the accident, and criminal forces are determined to obtain it. Abby gets her hands on the device in the course of her investigation, although she has no idea of its significance until she crosses paths with Dax, son of Australian assassin Jack Blackwell (Those Who Wish Me Dead), who will stop at nothing to get it back at the behest of his boss, mobster Gerry Connors. Human life has little value to Dax: like his now-deceased father and uncle, he's cold, ruthless, focused and highly skilled.

Abby has her own set of skills, although she's less confident in her driving abilities than she once was. An incident involving a famous actor destroyed her life on the west coast, so she has come east to escape media scrutiny and start over. Even so, she responds well to stress and proves to be a worthy foil for Dax.

The book is told from multiple viewpoints, including from Tara's trapped perspective as she tries to figure out what's going on around her and becomes determined to communicate with her physicians and her protective sister, Shannon. Once she regains control of her eye movement, she is able to painstakingly spell out words and phrases in a manner that will be familiar to anyone who's seen The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Dax, who has the hospital room bugged, accelerates his efforts when he finds out she is awake and communicative.

Dax knows Abby represents his best chance of getting to Tara and unlocking the secrets in Oltamu's phone, resulting in a cat-and-mouse pursuit that pits the two skilled individuals against each other from Maine to Boston. It's a gripping thriller that doesn't sacrifice characterization for the sake of action, although there's plenty of that. Koryta consistently creates characters that readers will hope reappear in future novels.