Three Weeks to Say Goodbye - C.J. Box

This was a departure for me in terms of CJ Box.  I haven’t posted any reviews of his books to date although I have read 3 novels by him in his Joe Picket series.  Those books I loved and I really do need to remedy the review situation on them.

But, Three Weeks to Say Goodbye!  I knew it wasn’t a Joe Picket novel when I downloaded it to my Kindle but Box’s writing in the previous offerings were most certainly 5 * but I had initial misgivings about this one in the opening pages. 

“God, I hate to be the one to tell you .”  “Tell me what?” A Beat. “The biological father wants Angelina Back.”  I made her repeat it in case I hadn’t heard her correctly. She did.  

Jack and Melissa have adopted a baby girl only to find that the adoption agency have not crossed all the T's or dotted the I's and after settling into the routine with the baby and loving her for nine months, the `father' receives a phone call from Julia Perala, the placements officer who handled their adoption, stating that the natural father had not signed away his rights to his daughter and that he now, through his father a Federal Judge, wanted his daughter back!

The father and grandfather turn up at the house to discuss the situation and it is clear that the baby’s father is less than interested, but the grandfather, the Federal Judge, gives them three weeks to give up the baby or he will turn up with the Sherriff!

The book now started to look interesting, imagine how would you feel in those circumstances.  You and your wife had been trying to make a family, suffered miscarriages and then ‘successfully’ and at great financial and emotional  cost, managed to adopt a child who you had loved and nurtured for nine months.... not a pretty thought.

Not my cup of tea, or so I thought. However I continued to read for a few more pages and Mr Box, like a couple of other authors I read at the moment, just sucks you in.  It is an easy writing style, well constructed and flowing.  Whether he had any knowledge of the subject of adoption or whether he just researched it I’m not sure. But he was writing an emotional book about parents losing a child to a teenage father who didn’t want it and to complicate matters the teenager had a disturbing personality and a Federal judge as a father.  And so a fight back began, but it was a fight back that was limited by circumstances, time, social standing and money, who wins, well, you’re just going to have to read it for yourself.

All I will say is; that this was not a Joe Picket book, and it is good to see that Mr Box has more than one story to tell and that augurs well for any reader who likes a well written story, laid out in a compelling and easy flowing way that just encourages you to turn each page!  And as the story develops, you discover that it is even darker and more horrible than you could have imagined, what could be more horrible than having a child, nurtured and loved by you for the first nine months of its life, taken from you..........

This isn’t a terribly long book, but it doesn’t need to be, at only 359 pages it starts of slowly and builds to an amazing climax.  26 chapters and in chapter 23 YOU too are ready to kill...

5 out of 5 stars