O.K., so I was fairly sure I had figured out who the bad guy was about three-fourths of the way through the book, and I was right. There were still other questions that kept me reading. And there were some things I never did figure out about this book.
Waking Lazarus by T. L. Hines is a CBA thriller, published by Bethany House, publication date, July, 2006. Its themes and plot elements are a mixture of child abduction, paranoia, miracle working, and resurrection from the dead. In fact, the novel begins with this line: “The first time Jude Allman died, he was eight years old.” How’s that for a hook?
Jude Allman dies a few more times over the course of the novel, and in order to do so, he must first, like Lazarus in the Bible, be raised from the dead. In fact, the recurring motif in the book is life and death. What does it mean to be alive? Can someone who is dead come alive again? What about the spiritually dead? Can those who are mentally exhausted and spiritually dead be revived? If the events in this novel were to be believed, there are formerly dead people, and nearly dead people, and mostly dead people, walking around all over Nebraska and South Dakota, the novel’s setting.
Jude Allman fits all three categories, and he’s also paranoid, believing that “they” are watching him, out to get him. His paranoia becomes a part of the mystery in the story since the reader is never sure whether he’s getting a true picture of what’s happening in the novel or a picture distorted by mental illness. It’s a made-for-TV movie in which no one is who he seems to be and not even the main character, Jude, is sure that what he’s experiencing is real.
Waking Lazarus never does deal with the deeper questions of why some people get a miracle and others don’t, or why Jude gets resurrected and others die. Nor do the characters in the novel take too much time out for pondering the meaning of life; they’re too busy responding to the bad guys and saving the kids. Still, Waking Lazarus tells a good story and the underlying Christian worldview is evident but not obtrusive.
The story is taut and free of dangling plot strands. The characters act, well, weird, but that’s because most of them are somewhat mentally unbalanced. I did have a few questions at the end of the novel, but you may not want to read them until you’ve read the novel itself:
Why does Ron suddenly recover from his mental illness, if that’s what it is?
Why does he have to touch people to get a message?
How did he lose his memory?
Why was being Jude so traumatic for Mr. Gress?
Why does he keep counting things? Is counting a symptom of paranoia?
Come back and tell me about it after you read the book.
Oh, I received a free advance reading copy of this book from Bethany House. Thanks, guys.