Ted Dekker's Saint ~ Reviewed

SAINT
By Ted Dekker
Published by WestBow Press (Oct. 2006)
ISBN: 1595540067

How does one cope when their identity is stripped from them and everything they believed to be true turns out to be lies?

This is what Carl Strople is forced to face an hour after he awakens tied to a bed next to his wife.

Carl and his family have been kidnapped. To save his wife and son, he must cooperate with their captors and kill two people within the hour.
The instructions are simple:
Kill Joseph and Mary Fabin.
No head shots.
No one else is to die.
Return within sixty minutes or your family dies.

Armed with a gun loaded with only two cartridges and using skills he learned in the Special Forces, Carl races to the Andrassy Hotel where the targets are staying. Overpowering the two guards at the door was easy, killing the targets became complicated.

Carl finds the Fabin’s waiting for him. With a tape recording made by Carl’s wife Kelly as proof, the Fabin’s tell Carl that he is in fact a missing CIA agent by the name of Peter Marker. Kidnapped by an underground operation known as the X Group two years previously, Carl’s memories and identity have been stripped and then rebuilt over and over again in order to train him as an assassin.

Carl finds himself faced with two choices: Believe that the woman tied to the bed with him less than an hour earlier is his wife and that she will die along with his son if he doesn’t kill the Fabin’s, or believe the Fabin’s story that everything he has been told is a lie and his wife is waiting for him back home in America.

Things soon become even more complicated for Carl Strople, otherwise known as Saint. Through torture and specialized drills, Carl has learned to shot with accuracy from 2000 feet out and has gained extraordinary emotional control. He has been trained for a specific mission, one that dangles by a thread when Carl comes face to face with the past the X Group tried to erase from his mind.

Ted Dekker has once again raised the bar in fiction. Comparable to any “24” television episode, SAINT is a tightly woven coil of twists that will keep readers glued to its pages long into the night. SAINT is Dekker at his best: action, suspense, and romance, with a touch of political intrigue.

Readers who enjoyed THR3E and BLINK will be pleased to find Dekker has returned to the psychological thriller genre. But be warned – all is not as it seems. SAINT is part of Project Showdown, so it stands to reason that the book switches to supernatural midway through. The only disappointment here for me was an element at the end of the story that didn’t seem to be foreshadowed earlier on in the book.

When asked about SAINT, Dekker likened it to the story of all of us born into the Kingdom. When the world tries to beat the Kingdom out of us, we can easily lose our first love and become confused about who we are and what we want to be.

Once more, Dekker has integrated an important message for all of us into a plot that will entertain and inspire until the very last page.

Reviewed by: Vennessa Ng
Review Blog: www.illuminatingfiction.com