Book 3 and the mountain of books is no smaller!

Yesterday I read Angela Hunt's The Face. No, it hasn't been on my bedside table all that long. In fact, the book was just released Nov 1. I was feeling guilty that I hadn't read it yet, though, and realized that reading only paranormal mysteries this week would probably burn me out. So I have to mix it up a bit and just grabbed. 

The Face is an interesting read for many reasons. First off, Angela Hunt is actually a prolific Christian author, something I knew going in but was only a little worried about. Mira picked up this title, however, so I figured it had to be either more along the thriller lines or the romance lines, and from the synopsis I knew it had to be thriller. The book does have a bit of a message to it. Ok, more than a bit, but it's not obnoxious or anything. Think of it more as a moral message rather than a biblical one. Plus the book got a pretty good review from PW before its release. 

The book deals with quite a few different elements and Hunt has obviously managed to juggle them like a pro. On the one end you have the medical aspects - Treacher Collins syndrome, facial implants, reconstructive surgeries... On the other, you have the CIA as a whole. And finally, there's the technical aspects. Sarah is a computer expert working on programs that require quite a bit of work for a layman to understand. Fortunately, Hunt has done all the work for us in that regard as she lays out the details in a way that even the most technically impaired person can understand with ease. 

Can you tell I'm not a Christian reader? I actually have no problem reading books with "messages," books that make you think about moral issues. My problem comes from, however, the fact that I don't want religion shoved down my throat (and I mean not one iota of offense to readers who DO read religious fiction, here). Readers like me,  trust me that you don't have to worry here. 

In The Face, twenty-one-year-old Sarah Sims has lived her entire life locked away at a covert CIA facility in Spain. Born with a life-threatening case of Treacher Collins syndrome, the CIA picked up the tab for surgeries that would allow her to see, hear, and basically survive on her own. The result is a face that has been patched together and is difficult for even her coworkers to look at. 

Renee Carey was fifteen when her beloved older brother died - just two days after losing his wife and baby girl. Or so she thought. Just after her mother's death, Renee receives notice of a storage facility that her mother had been renting. While cleaning it out, Renee discovers a letter that suggests that her niece did not die in childbirth after all, but that she was taken in by a member of the CIA. She applies and eventually gets clearance to meet her long lost niece and is determined to help her to live a normal life and to give her the love and family support she's missed out on all these years. 

Sarah agrees to undergo a very experimental facial implant, but the project that she's been working on, and the case that has consumed her fellow workers at the facility has reached a level of dangerous proportions. Sarah herself, unknown to much of the outside world, may even become a target. 

So, thriller, yes. Story about acceptance and love, yes. Good read? Definitely. It was fast and basically all consuming. I read it in just a matter of hours and really enjoyed it.