Soul Tracker (soul tracker #1)

From Publishers Weekly The prolific Myers steadily plugs along, offering competent novels such as this one, which provides glimpses of heaven while exploring the darker side of the supernatural. David Kauffman is a man consumed by grief. His lovely teenage daughter, Emily, has recently committed suicide, or so it seems, until Kauffman finds himself looking into her remarkable violet-blue eyes�in the face of another person. His obsession to discover what really happened to Emily will literally take him to hell and back. David finds an unlikely ally in Dr. Gita Patekar, a thanatologist from Nepal (she studies death and dying). She's employed by the Life After Life program, which claims to be running a series of studies designed to scientifically track the soul after death. Yet something malevolent lurks beneath the surface since, paradoxically, the search for longevity leads to a loss of respect for human life. As David learns that his obsessive love can obliterate his need for personal faith, Gita discovers her need to learn to love, defying her hyperdependence on logic. Myers likes to flirt with disturbing violence (animal lovers will cringe when a bunny is brutalized), but he stops just short of offending his conservative Christian readers. He also includes dialogue supporting the claims of Jesus Christ, which this same audience will appreciate. As usual, Myers fans will not be disappointed. Copyright � Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Myers, author of the wonderful Eli (2000), is a bit off the mark with Soul Tracker , about a research group using virtual-reality technology to chart near-death experiences. The plot moves along because of David Kauffman, an agnostic who recently lost his daughter to suicide and whose grief causes him to use extraordinary means to communicate with her spirit/presence/soul. There are some elegant passages, but virtual reality is a worn-out sf device; in fact, the novel reads as if it were written in the early 1990s. John Mort Copyright � American Library Association. All rights reserved What if you could visit heaven and hell, traveling when and wherever you wish . . . without ever dying? What if your teenage daughter, the joy of your life, had died a tragic death and you discovered a way to visit her? What if there were people and beings, on both sides of the grave, who want to stop your return? These are the questions facing novelist David Kauffman. As a single parent he is devastated when his young daughter meets an untimely death. Desperate to contact her, he meets Gita Patekar, a beautiful and committed Christian with a scarred and shame-ridden past. She works for “Life After Life”—an organization dedicated to tracking and recording the experiences of the soul once it leaves the body. Despite Gita’s warnings that God is opposed to contacting the dead, David uses the organization’s computer to try to find his daughter. In the process they discover Gita’s organization has some very deep and dark secrets. A suspense-filled game of cat and mouse begins—both on earth and beyond the grave—as the couple work together, fall in love, and struggle to expose the truth . . . until they come face to face with the ultimate Love and Truth. Novelist David Kauffman, devastated over the apparent suicide of his teenage daughter, discovers a virtual reality program that will allow him to search heaven and hell for answers about her death--an undertaking that will either lead him to faith or cost him his own life