Book Review: BoneMan's Daughters by Ted Dekker

Title: BoneMan's Daughters
Author: Ted Dekker
Publisher: Center Street
Copyright: 2009
Pages: 401
ISBN: 978-1-59995-195-9
Genre: Fiction/thriller

A sharp intelligence officer leaves his family yet again for redeployment to Iraq. Though Ryan Evans continues to support them financially, he's a husband and father in name only. After a bomb destroys Ryan's convoy, a radical Muslim captures him. Ryan escapes, but the distressing things he sees during his torture leave him resolved to reclaim his daughter and become the father he hasn't been.

Ryan's daughter Bethany is an up-and-coming model. But the producers of a popular teen catalog aren't the only ones with their eyes on Bethany. A brutal serial killer abducts her. BoneMan breaks the bones of his victims without breaking their skin. Then he leaves them to die. BoneMan's chilling preciseness offers Ryan little hope of rescuing Bethany, yet Ryan's convinced he is the only one with a shred of hope to save her.

Unfortunately for him, BoneMan feels the same. Everyone else does not. Ryan's estranged wife, the local authorities, and the FBI all feel that Ryan may be responsible for his own daughter's disappearance.

I couldn't help feeling that Dekker missed his own point in BoneMan's Daughters. True, his story explores the issue of what a desperate man will do to rescue his endangered daughter. He reveals that BoneMan's Daughters first took root through Dekker's experiences with his own eighteen-year-old daughter, who became involved with an abusive man; this is when Dekker wondered just how far he would go to get his daughter back.

But in the same interview, Dekker also speaks about his goal of ending his stories on a note of hope.¹ Revenge and escape from danger, however, don't necessarily add up to hope.

From a Christian viewpoint, hope must spring from Christ, both his death on the cross and His resurrection. (Dekker claims the Christian faith, and BoneMan's Daughters appears courtesy of Center Street, a Christian-toned imprint of Hachette.) By omitting this link between hope and Jesus Christ, Dekker clearly targets the general market. But even in the general market, escape from danger doesn't automatically produce hope. Instead, hope springs from the expectation for a better life.

I recognize that each of us might define "a better life" in different ways. Our stages of life and our unique experiences might even cause us to change how we define "a better life" and "hope." But the way Dekker ends BoneMan's Daughters, I find it much more likely that the characters will develop psychoses or severe depression. And I doubt if those scenarios fit most people's definition of a better life.

Although Dekker avoids obsessive profanities, conservative readers may take offense at some of the language he includes. Furthermore, Christian readers may be troubled by the parallels Dekker draws between his story and a Messianic prophecy. At least, the parallels troubled me.

Certainly Dekker presents a well-crafted story. He always does. But on the whole, this is one of his darkest novels with the fewest redeeming qualities.

¹Miriam Parker, "Ted Dekker Interview," TitleTrakk, http://www.titletrakk.com/author-interviews/ted-dekker-interview-3.htm (accessed 25 August 2009).