"Intriguing character-driven thriller"

By: Daniel Pyne

Genres: Suspense

Posted: March 29, 2015

Jay Johnson's life has been turned upside down. Forcibly placed into the Witness Protection Program, Jay is told he must remember what happened that put him there... but Jay has no idea what the government thinks he knows.

FIFTY MICE has an intriguing premise. I like that we know upfront that Jay is an unreliable narrator so we can filter through what he says and does. The aura of mystery and suspense is quickly built as the almost staccato style writing amps up the tension.

Unfortunately, FIFTY MICE begins to lag action-wise somewhere in the middle as we get stuck in the mundane, daily routines of the characters. Jay is assigned a wife and child as part of the Witness Protection Program, and thus the interactions between Jay, Ginger, and Helen begin to consume more of the storyline as the pace slows down quite a bit.

FIFTY MICE is the sort of story that reads as if it is a movie or television show. The premise is a fascinating one and I enjoyed the majority of the story. Readers who like a good character-driven thriller will appreciate FIFTY MICE.

Book Summary

What if a man is placed in the Federal Witness Protection Program against his will?

And doesn’t even know what he supposedly knows that merits a new name, a new identity, a new life? Jay Johnson is an Average Joe, a thirty-something guy with a job in telephone sales, a regular pick-up basketball game, and a devoted girlfriend he seems ready to marry. But one weekday afternoon, he’s abducted on a Los Angeles Metro train, tranquilized, interrogated, and his paper trail obliterated. What did he see, what terrible crime—or criminal—is he keeping secret? It must be something awfully big. The trouble is, Jay has no clue.

Furious and helpless, and convinced that the government has made a colossal mistake, Jay is involuntarily relocated to a community on Catalina Island—which turns out to be inhabited mainly by other protected witnesses. Isolated in a world of strangers, Jay begins to realize that only way out is through the twisted maze of lies and unreliable memories swirling through his own mind. If he can locate—or invent— a repressed memory that might satisfy the Feds, maybe he can make it back to the mainland and his wonderful, even if monotonous, life.

Set in a noir contemporary L.A. and environs, Fifty Mice is a Hitchcockian thriller as surreal and mysterious as a Kafka nightmare. Chilling, paranoiac, and thoroughly original, it will have readers grasping to distinguish what is real and what only seems that way.

Fifty Mice by Daniel Pyne

Fifty Mice

by: Daniel Pyne

Blue Rider Press
January 1, 2015
On Sale: December 30, 2014
Featuring: Jay Johnson
304 pages
ISBN: 0399171649
EAN: 9780399171642
Kindle: B00ISEOIYY
Hardcover / e-Book

Available in: