The Barnes & Noble Review A New Face in Suspense Iris Johansen has grown up. This is not to say that her previous novels were immature, but something has changed — for the better — with this novelist, and it shows in her new romantic thriller, The Face of Deception. This is one of the most riveting reads of the year — brutal and shocking at times, but compelling enough to be accessible for the faint of heart. This novel is right up there with The Day After Tomorrow and Patricia Cornwell as a major-league thriller, but it has a slightly gentle touch. And, yes, romance plays a big part in the story, but it feels like a perfectly natural progression as Johansen's heroine finds herself going deeper and deeper into the dark twists and turns of this story's plot. Eve Duncan is a forensic sculptor who loves her work — and at times, the work is gruesome. Her job is to take a skull and artistically re-create the face around it to identify the dead person. Eve grows attached to the personalities that come through the faces she sculpts, and in general, she has been involved in fighting the problem of missing children ever since her own daughter, Bonnie, was kidnapped and murdered several years prior to the beginning of the novel. Eve's compassion even extends to the man who murdered her daughter — for she wants to know where her daughter is buried in order to find some closure to that terrible event. But her daughter's killer is put to death before he can tell her anything, and Eve feels like she's floundering. Then a stranger comes to her studio door, and her lifechangesdramatically. John Logan is no ordinary man. He's a Bill Gates wannabe with the billions of dollars and the computer chips to prove it — and he wants something desperately from Eve. He makes her a proposition: If she will work for him for two weeks, in an isolated