Eye for an Eye. - book reviews

National Review, April 26, 1993 by Priscilla L. Buckley

The opening of Eye for an Eye rivals in graphic horror the shower scene in Psycho. It's October 31, and a mother in Manhattan is on the phone to her daughter in the suburbs. They're interrupted by a knock on the daughter's door - ghosts and a Muppet come trick-or-treating. Once inside the door, the teenage ghosts throw off their sheets and proceed to gang-rape and murder the young woman as the mother listens.

At the funeral someone slips a card into the mother's hand: "Victims Anonymous" is all it says. And so Karen Newman, a divorced, middleaged PR executive, is recruited into a vigilante network that needs her talents to go national against a society and a criminal-justice system gone berserk. In this novel, Mrs. Holzer, who is both a lawyer and an experienced journalist, hurtles at breakneck pace from one scene of cunning and violence to another, as she explores the ethics of frontier justice transposed to the urban battleground. Her characters may be a little larger than life - too handsome, too seductive, too virile, too wicked, too pure - but what she has written, for all its street smarts, is a modern-day morality play. A word of warning: Although Eye for an Eye is a page-turner, it should be read with attention lest some of the subtler nuances of this well-crafted and ingenious plot, with its O. Henry twist at the end, be missed.