The Never List

Childhood friends, Sarah and Jennifer survive a car crash in which Jennifer's mother is killed, inspiring them to come up with a 'Never List', a catalogue of potential dangers such as wild animals, household accidents, interaction with strangers, unprotected buildings, the transmission of diseases, they would take the utmost precautions to avoid. The duo devote themselves to accumulating various protections such as face masks, anti-bacterial soaps, pepper sprays while adopting all manner of paranoid behaviour to ensure their safety. However, six years later when as freshmen students they foolishly break one of their golden rules - never get into a car with a stranger - their lives spiral downwards both literally and metaphorically into the basement captivity of a psychopathic university professor. 

Sarah eventually manages to escape from her years of torture and abuse in this man's cellar but twelve years later she is forced to return to the scene of her ordeal in her attempt to find her friend Jennifer's body and to uncover more evidence that hopefully will keep her parole-eligible tormentor in jail.

The Never List starts out as an intriguing psychological thriller. Author Koethi Zan has some good material here - the prisoner-captor relationship, the female sex trade, sado-masochism clubs, religious cults - but she fails to mine it fully, almost as if she is too fearful to fully examine the unsettling issues she has raised. As a result, the novel evolves into a kind of a mystery adventure story but with enough twists and turns to keep the reader going until the very end.