Prolific author and film director Eric Red has previously shown us very memorably that those long open sparsely populated highways just aren’t safe both with his screenplay The Hitcher, filmed with Rutger Hauer in 1986 and more recently with the homicidal trucker in his novel White Knuckle, which is in pre-production at the moment.

Well, put the key in the ignition and rev up. Eric Red takes us on another dizzying, high octane, pedal to the metal thriller. Stopping Power is a gripping thriller that evokes the very best cinematic vehicular mayhem movies. Imagine Vanishing Point, crossed with Speed and the infamous O.J. Simpson car chase and enjoy the wild ride. Stephanie Power is taking a well-deserved break with her teenage daughter. They’re on a road trip in a luxury motorhome. Pulling up to refuel, Stephanie finds the motorhome and daughter missing. Both have been taken by a desperate and lethal bank robber Ilse Bakke, who demands that Stephanie drive around in her original getaway car, as a decoy for the police while Bakke drives to freedom in the other direction. If Stephanie stops or is caught by the increasingly trigger-happy police – the daughter dies. Of course, Bakke can see everything on the live TV news feed.

Stopping Power is a rapidly paced page-turner from the first paragraph, and is tightly written with a staccato beat that screams for the book to be filmed. This is Red’s uniquely visual writing style – he writes like a film director. An interesting device used to great effect in this book is applying the normal third-person narrative for the bulk of the book but using the first-person for the sequences detailing Stephanie’s thoughts and feelings as the main protagonist. But IS she really the main character? Ilse Bakke as the truly psychopathic schizophrenic villain is memorably disturbing and well-drawn, eliciting both sympathy, repugnance, and fear. She is the perfect foil to test just how far a mother will go to protect her daughter and to explore the beginnings of Stockholm Syndrome between Bakke and her hostage.

All in all, this is another triumph for Eric Red.

Stopping Power is published by Siedelman & Company and is available in paperback now, with the Kindle version available from Dec 3rd