Steve's daughter, Shirley, seems to have inherited her father's gullibility. At fourteen, she is infantile by comparison with the knowing Traci. She witnesses her mother's obsessions and mood swings but fails to recognise that they might just be an obstacle to her parents' reunion. Desperate to be back with her father, she nevertheless accepts the offer of movie stardom from a stranger in the street, something that would have aroused the suspicions of a much younger child. (Don't they have public information films in the USA?)

As for the eponymous Traci, after the first few chapters she is relegated to a minor role in the action. Although it is indirectly her fault that Steve and his family find themselves in physical danger as well as emotional turmoil, she never develops into the rounded personality that is promised at the beginning. Only on the most superficial level do we learn what makes Traci tick, and by the end we know just as little about her as does the unquestioning Steve.

New surprises await the reader at every corner. No sooner did I think I knew where the story was going than I found myself wrong-footed. The drawback with this is that it was achieved by cheating, on a scale that would have made Agatha Christie (the biggest cheat in the literary business) proud. The reason no rational person could hope to foresee the next plot turn is that the action does not spring from the characters, as I personally believe the best fiction should. At times Steve and his family appear to be carried along on a tide of events beyond their understanding. It might, of course, be argued that this is the author's intention -- to show what happens to a man when he loses control of his life. Nevertheless, I finished the book with a sense of disappointment. The long-awaited end twist left me wondering whether the whole thing had been a subtle and elaborate comedy -- a comedy whose point I had completely missed.