Chasing the Skip (review)

Call him a skip chaser, a bail-bond enforcement agent, or a bounty hunter, but Ricki Maxwell’s father has made a living tracking down fugitives since before his daughter was born. Ricki’s mother had always softened Dad’s absence by telling the young girl that her father was a crime fighter, but by adolescence Ricki had caught on that he was simply an absentee father. Now, at age fifteen, Ricki is about to learn that Mom’s version of family history had more than a touch of well-meaning revisionism. Mom has taken off with yet another boyfriend, and Ricki is left in the care of the father she hardly knows, joining him on a mission to take seventeen-year-old Ian Burnham, charged with grand theft auto, into custody. The chase itself is a serio-comic pastiche of calamities, with Ricki mightily attracted to the manipulative young criminal who keeps slipping through her father’s hands. There’s nothing remotely funny, though, when Ian turns on Ricki, causing her the pain of yet another betrayal and testing whether Dad is really as committed to his daughter as he claims to be. Debut writer Patterson offers a laudably balanced plot, at once an action-packed adventure story and a rocky but tender tale of father-daughter reconciliation. Fifteen-year-old Ricki may not be the most lovable protagonist, but her childish outbursts of petulance and risky behaviors are not without cause, and readers will appreciate the optimistic conclusion that suggests a stable future.