The Roadrunner
By Trisha R. Thomas 

      The Roadrunner started out with a wonderful plot line: a retired major league baseball player, Dell "Roadrunner" Fletcher and his seemingly happy home with his wife Leah and two children, Josh and Kayla. He retired from a sport that he loved because of a common ACL injury which his mind refused to allow to heal. His life was simply a storybook. A wonderful wife, loving children, a happy home and all the ingredients to a fairy-tale ending, but with his dependence on prescription pain killers and a negative mental state, all of this came tumbling down. As the story progresses, it takes some very unrealistic turns and reinforces negative stereotypes of the Los Angeles Police Department.

     The cartoon character, Roadrunner, was a sly creature able to outrun and outsmart the coyote, but in this novel the Roadrunner was defeated. Circumstances he put himself in contributed to his mental and physical demise so the juxtaposition of the fictional hero and the fictional person really makes you stop and think about what a perilous journey life centers on. Toward the end, sunlight again shone on the roadrunner and he makes strides toward a comeback on a personal level.

      Ms. Thomas' sophomore novel, The Roadrunner, needed a bit of reality thrown in to make it somewhat believable. This book had sex, violence, police brutality, betrayal, hurt, elements of danger and deceit--all the ingredients to make a novel so interesting that you just can't put it down. Sequenced in a different order, The Roadrunner could have been show-stopping, but somehow it just didn't quite make it over that hump. The most poignant part of the book, to me, is the fact that friends aren't always to be trusted and that is a hard lesson to learn. Confidantes aren't always to be confided in, for they might take the information that you give them and use it against you. The Roadrunner had important life lessons interspersed throughout, if you can keep reading to find them. This book is quite different from her first offering, so it is not wise to compare. Take each of them for how they are presented to find an enjoyable reading experience.