In Don’t Look Back, Eve Hardaway, newly single mother of one, is on a trip she’s long dreamed of—a rafting and hiking tour through the jungles and mountains of Oaxaca, in southern Mexico. Eve wanders off the trail, to a house in the distance with a menacing man in the yard beyond it, throwing machetes at a human-shaped target. Disturbed by the sight, Eve moves quickly and quietly back to her group, taking care to avoid being seen. As she creeps along, she finds a broken digital camera, marked with the name Teresa Hamilton. Later that night, in a rarely used tourist cabin, she finds a discarded prescription bottle—also with the name Teresa Hamilton. From the camera’s memory card, Eve discovers Teresa Hamilton took a photo of that same menacing looking man in the woods. Teresa Hamilton has since disappeared.
Now the man in the woods is after whoever was snooping around his house. With a violent past and deadly mission, he will do anything to avoid being discovered. A major storm wipes out the roads and all communication with the outside world. Now the tour group is trapped in the jungle with a dangerous predator with a secret to protect. With her only resource her determination to live, Eve must fight a dangerous foe and survive against incredible odds—if she’s to make it back home alive.
The week-long vacation in Oaxaca, Mexico was supposed to be an anniversary gift for Eve Hardaway and her husband. Then came her husband’s infidelity, though, followed by their divorce, and just like that, the trip went from couples celebration to singles retreat.
Rather than wallow, Eve decides to view the trip as a chance to escape from the ordinary and the everyday and find herself again – to discover who she is outside of marriage and motherhood. But when Eve stumbles across evidence of a missing female journalist and into the sights of the man responsible for the woman’s disappearance, she starts to realize that the ordinary and the everyday aren’t so bad after all…
Don’t Look Back is the latest release from New York Times bestselling author Gregg Hurwitz. I really enjoyed the last Hurwitz novel I read, 2013’s Tell No Lies, but I’m sorry to say that Don’t Look Back simply doesn’t stack up. Eve’s a delightfully bad-ass heroine (for the last half of the book, she’s essentially a female John McClane, complete with bloody feet and dirty wife-beater), and love interest Will and plucky “cripple” Claire make for entertaining and surprisingly able sidekicks; Hurwitz’s villain, though, is such a cartoonish, moustache-twirling bad guy that you can’t help but roll your eyes every time he comes on screen. Hurwitz does a decent job of transporting the reader to the depths of the Mexican jungle, but his descriptions of the flora, fauna, and geography are often so elaborate that they detract from the plot and sap the story of narrative drive. The book’s got some serious pacing problems. While the setup is interesting, Hurwitz dedicates too much ink to it, and as a result, very little happens during the first 200 pages. Then, when Hurwitz does finally get the ball rolling, the action’s too relentless. The entire second half of Don’t Look Back is essentially just one long chase scene – impossible situation followed by improbable escape, repeated over and over again until the final chapter. After a while, the pattern becomes not only predictable, but tedious – not what I look for in a good thriller.
I appreciate the message Hurwitz is trying to send with this book: that we, as a culture, take too much for granted. Our lives, our loves, our safety, our civilization – none of it’s a given, and we should never treat it as such. It’s a good lesson that almost everyone could stand to learn; I just wish Hurwitz’s delivery was slightly less longwinded and overwrought.
Reviewed by Kat
